Overview

Enable and support women and children. Sr. Clare Agnew 1840

Catherine Mc Auley’s theme song was Mercy and so her spirituality was Mercy. Everything she had came from God to whom she had given her all. Catherine’s own experience of God’s Mercy in her life was what enabled her to open her heart and her hands to those around her and spread the good news of God’s unceasing Love and Mercy for the people.

‘Sweet Mercy – soothing, patient, kind

Softens the high and rears the fallen mind.’

(C. McAuley)

Discover Catherine’s spirit in prayer with reflections from “The Mystical Heart of Catherine McAuley”, by Madeline Duckett, rsm and Carol Ong, rsm (Melbourne, Australia).

Catherine McAuley was a woman of determination, vision, humour and immense practicality. Within and beyond all of these qualities, we know her as a woman of deep faith, a woman of prayer. Through the unspoken spaces in her letters we glean that her faith and attention to prayer were called upon again and again as each new circumstance demanded a response. We glean further that she was, from her earliest years, stirred with desire to serve God through serving the poor. This desire grew with her till it became a strongly focused dream which became fully realised in a way she herself had never imagined - when the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy came into being.

In these reflections you will look at and pray with Catherine through the lens of contemplation and “everyday mysticism”. From this perspective we can assume that Catherine was a person who was faithful to her own inner movements, her own heart stirrings. She was a woman who listened, who noticed, who allowed herself to feel her responses to the needs confronting her in her times. And she was a woman who acted! From sight, to feeling, to prayer and then to action went the dynamic in her life over and over again. The key to it all was her returning again and again to the heart of the One she loved and whose will she sought more than anything else in life. More and more she was able to trust the abiding Presence and Providence of God as she reflected and prayed over each experience.

Her story is a story of action-contemplation par excellence. It is a story for a time such as ours, so caught up with action, busyness and the push to do more and more and more. She gives us a model for faith-filled action, centred on prayer in a time so much in need of knowing how to build reflection and contemplation into busy lives. She is a living example of how our hearts, like hers, “can always be in the same place centred in God.” Finally, she gives us a clue to one of the deepest desires in an increasing number of people today – how to live life at depth even when extremely active.

Thank you Catherine, for what you share with us if we sit still enough and long enough to listen to your mercy wisdom, a wisdom that reaches into the wells of practical mysticism and takes us to the Source. Here we know experientially that all is one!