En cierto modo, es dif\u00edcil imaginar dos almas femeninas m\u00e1s diferentes que las de Catalina de Siena y Elizabeth Ann Seton.<\/p>\n
Virgen y Doctora de la Iglesia, Catalina vivi\u00f3 su vida entre visiones, \u00e9xtasis y milagros. Predic\u00f3 p\u00fablicamente a un grupo de disc\u00edpulos ansiosos, escribi\u00f3 cartas apasionadas y suplicantes a papas y prelados, y realiz\u00f3 milagros de multiplicaci\u00f3n de alimentos mientras ella misma ayunaba en extremo. Incluso estuvo casada m\u00edsticamente con Cristo, que le dio un anillo de bodas invisible.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth, on the other hand, was born in New York, in a time much closer to our own. She got married, had kids, and converted in a fairly normal manner. Even when she became a religious, she kept it real\u2014with a staid, starched black bonnet and daily duties done with discretion. In her life there were no extreme miracles or metaphors, no weird circumstances for biographers to smooth over.<\/p>\n
If Catherine was extreme, even fanatical\u2014someone we might walk quickly away from if we saw her on the street\u2014Elizabeth was a saint we can get close to, someone we could have over for dinner.<\/p>\n
But, the truth must be told: Elizabeth was in her own way extreme\u2014an oddity, an outlier\u2014in exactamente de la misma manera<\/i> que era Catherine.<\/p>\n
En el coraz\u00f3n de las historias de ambos se encuentra la misma convicci\u00f3n que vemos en todos los santos, un apego casi absurdo que los diferencia de la mayor parte del resto de la humanidad. La religi\u00f3n, han descubierto los santos, no es ni sentimientos c\u00e1lidos hacia Dios ni frases piadosas, ni una \u00e9tica \u00fatil ni un impulso de buen coraz\u00f3n para alimentar a los hambrientos o educar a los pobres.<\/p>\n
Para Isabel y Catalina, el centro del culto es un hombre, el hombre hist\u00f3rico real Jes\u00fas de Nazaret, que vivi\u00f3, sufri\u00f3 y muri\u00f3 y luego resucit\u00f3, y que hizo y sigue haciendo esta cosa tan incre\u00edble: darnos su cuerpo como alimento.<\/p>\n
The saints totally buy this. They harbor an intense love for the Lord in the Eucharist\u2014what looks to be bread and wine, but is realmente<\/i> Su Cuerpo y Su Sangre.<\/p>\n
Christ\u2019s blood in particular was a big thing for Catherine, and it figures in her most intense visions. In one recurring vision, she feeds at Christ\u2019s wounded side like a baby feeding at his mother\u2019s breast. It was one of her main messages: this bread we are given to eat, this blood to drink, is the source, the center, the wellspring of our life, just as the mother\u2019s milk is the only sustenance for her child.<\/p>\n
Catalina dio testimonio de ello no s\u00f3lo a trav\u00e9s de sus visiones y escritos, sino en su propio<\/i> body. Her biographer, Blessed Raymond of Capua, tells of how in the last ten years of her life she subsisted only on water and the Eucharist\u2014a feat that has led many modern commentators to posit that at the heart of her vocation was nothing more than an eating disorder.<\/p>\n
But if Catherine\u2019s life looks pathological when viewed from our modern mentality, within the context of Christ\u2019s own words, it makes total sense. Catherine is the living witness to what He says to us in the Gospel of John: \u201cOs aseguro que si no com\u00e9is la carne del Hijo del hombre y beb\u00e9is su sangre, no tendr\u00e9is vida en vosotros.<\/i>\"<\/i> (Juan 6:51).<\/p>\n
Raymond tells us that there was a direct relationship in Catherine\u2019s life between the Eucharist and her vital strength: \u201cHer longing for more and more frequent communion was so intense that when she could not receive it her very body felt the deprivation, and her forces seemed to droop.\u201d But, \u201cwhenever she received communion, a very torrent of graces and consolations flooded her soul.”<\/p>\n
Isabel vivi\u00f3 este mismo tipo de dependencia de la Eucarist\u00eda. Incluso antes de hacerse cat\u00f3lica, estaba hipnotizada por la idea de la Eucarist\u00eda, hambrienta de lo que no pod\u00eda tener.<\/p>\n
It is an interesting fact that when she was a child, the Episcopalian book of prayer stated that \u201cthe Body and Blood of Christ\u2026 son en verdad y de hecho tomadas<\/i> and received by the faithful in the Lord\u2019s Supper\u201d\u2014a recognition of Christ\u2019s Real Presence in the sacrament. But in 1789, when Elizabeth was fifteen, the words \u201cespiritualmente<\/i> taken and received\u201d were inserted, enshrining the idea that communion was a \u201creminder\u201d of the Last Supper, not a memorial of it.<\/p>\n
In front of this change, young and fervent Elizabeth found herself desperately hungering for a real connection with the Lord. The \u201csymbolic\u201d wine she received at the Episcopalian Sunday service could in no way slake the thirst she felt for Christ\u2014as evidenced by her habit of going to the sexton after the liturgy to ask permission to drink what was left.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth did not have a drinking problem any more than Catherine had an eating disorder; what she did have was an almost insatiable longing for the Eucharistic Lord, a desire that could not be satisfied by Episcopalian \u201ccommunion.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a wound in Elizabeth\u2019s soul that opened her in unexpected ways to the Real Presence of Christ that she encountered in Italy after the death of her husband. The first thing that struck her was how Catholics acted around the Tabernacle.<\/p>\n
When she first entered a Catholic church, she was fascinated by the \u201cold men and women, young women and all sorts of people kneeling promiscuously about the altar.” And she tells of witnessing a priest unlocking a chapel door \u201cwith that composed and equal eye as if his soul had entered before him.\u201d She confesses: \u201cMy soul would willingly have followed after.”<\/p>\n
Before long, her fascination became focused on the Eucharistic host itself. When attending a Mass, she was the recipient of a loud, rude comment from a fellow Protestant visitor at the very moment of the consecration and found herself unexpectedly shaken by his irreverence. \u201cMy very heart trembled with shame and sorrow.”<\/p>\n
Y luego est\u00e1 el impacto continuo y repetido de las procesiones eucar\u00edsticas que pasaban con frecuencia bajo la ventana de su habitaci\u00f3n. Despu\u00e9s de una de ellas, escribe en una carta a su amiga episcopaliana Rebecca,<\/p>\n
\"Qu\u00e9 felices ser\u00edamos si crey\u00e9ramos lo que creen estas queridas almas: que poseer a Dios<\/strong> en el Sacramento. . . . Cuando llevan el Sant\u00edsimo Sacramento bajo mi ventana . . . . No puedo contener las l\u00e1grimas al pensarlo. Dios m\u00edo qu\u00e9 feliz ser\u00eda. . . si pudiera encontrarte en la iglesia como ellos\".<\/em><\/p>\n This longing to believe what Catholics believe became for Elizabeth an unbearable pain. One day as the procession passed by she was so overcome that she threw herself down on the floor, and looking at a picture of Mary, begged for faith in the Eucharist. Elizabeth called this overwhelming desire for Christ in the Eucharist a \u201cwildness\u201d in her soul\u2014and so it was. There she was, the sensible Episcopalian daughter reduced to jelly in front of a host carried in a monstrance out on the street. It was a Catherine of Siena moment.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t need to tell you the rest of the story, how this fervor carried Elizabeth forward to the very day that she converted and then to the Eucharistic table where she was able to satisfy her hunger for the Lord at last. But I want to underline what both Catherine of Siena and Elizabeth Ann Seton are urging by the witness of their lives. Each, in their own vehement way, points us to Christ Himself, who wants to give Himself to us as food and drink. Through their lives, He repeats again that this is the very reason He has come: to unite himself with us bodily, to be with us in our cares and worries\u2014not as a thought, an idea, but as a flesh-and-blood reality.<\/p>\n We ought to beg Catherine and Elizabeth to come to our aid here, to pray for us that we too should know this wild tearing at our hearts, that we should receive this incredible faith in our Lord\u2019s Presence, a faith that is crazy\u2014but true.<\/p>\n