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A saint, Catherine told us, is a sinner who loves. We who lived with her saw, experienced, and learned from, her day-to-day love and struggles to love. Here are just four of the many stories that could be told.
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It was the early 1980s when I was an applicant. Catherine had spoken to us after lunch a number of times about our call to live true Christian poverty.
She had seen certain signs that concerned her, and she was afraid that we as a community might be compromising the call she received from the Lord to identify ourselves with the poor, to be beggars for the poor, and to be poor ourselves. And she meant not just poor in spirit, but materially poor.
She had spoken with passion and I had listened carefully, taking it all in. However, an incident happened which expanded my understanding of her words in a direction I would never have expected.
It was late September, the height of apple season, and our root cellars contained a growing number of baskets of apples from our orchards.
The local directors were gathered in Combermere for their annual meetings, and that afternoon I happened to be passing through the kitchen.
Catherine, too, was passing through, and I saw her speak with Jan Hills, the head cook.
“Let’s have apple pie for dessert tonight,” Catherine said, “as a special cheer-up for the directors.”
Jan said that she didn’t think she could manage it. The kitchen staff might be able to make the crust, she said, but they wouldn’t have time to make supper and get all those apples sliced as well.
“Then just send someone into Barry’s Bay to buy the pie filling,” Catherine said.
Jan said, “all right,” and that evening the whole community had apple pie for dessert—pies with homemade crusts and store-bought filling.
As a youngster in the community, I marveled at what Catherine had directed Jan to do: drive twenty-two km. (14 miles), paying for the gas, to buy canned pie filling during the apple season!
Her passionate love for poverty didn’t prevent her from an extravagant act of love for her Madonna House family.
Charlie Cavanaugh
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This incident happened in the 1960s when Sandra, now an elder in the community, was a relatively new Catholic, a new member of Madonna House, and young.
In the mornings just before breakfast, B would come over to the main house and join us for breakfast. She had low blood sugar, and the mornings were not her best time.
I was the breakfast cook, and as B passed through the kitchen on her way to the dining room, she muttered, “Smells like the porridge is burnt”—and walked on past.
I got angry. I picked up some pot holders and said out loud, “Why don’t you come and cook it yourself then,” and threw the pot holders at her.
Catherine stopped, turned, and looked at me. She walked back and said, “Come with me.”
I thought, “O dear, I’m really in trouble.”
She took me out the back door, down the steps and into the yard. She pulled two chairs together, and we sat down.
Then B very gently asked me what was bothering me. I was able to tell her my troubles, and then we rose, friends again, and returned to the kitchen.
I had experienced a whole new side of B that I had never seen before, and I never forgot the love that shone through her eyes that morning.
Sandra Wood
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In her later years, Catherine was less active, but she continued to pass on more of the spirit of the gift shop to those of us who worked there. Even when she was bedridden, she would send us items we could sell when they came her way.
The last time she called me over to her cabin, in 1983, two years before she died, Catherine handed me a big bowl of strawberries and asked, “Can you sell them for the poor?” She was probably remembering the early days of the shop when we made and sold strawberry jam.
At the end of her life, although many things passed from her mind, Catherine never forgot the poor.
Linda Lambeth
