she changed my life and put me in touch with God
Excerpted from a talk Mark gave at the diocesan men’s retreat this year.
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I never met Catherine Doherty, but I feel I have had a deep encounter with this woman. More than anyone I’ve ever met, she changed my life and put me in touch with God. As I wrestled with the Madonna House vocation and with God himself, he and Catherine turned my ideas upside down and inside out in a way that was often painful but ultimately liberating
My Experience in Madonna House
When I first came to Combermere over ten years ago, I saw things happening between people that went further than is usually possible—trust, forgiveness, service. There was an authenticity to it. It was the Gospel being lived out in a very real way, and it was very healing. I started to let my guard down, and something in me began to relax.
As time went on, I realized how ordinary and human the members of Madonna House were and that this wasn’t something they were doing on their own. This was a community of poor instruments in the hand of God.
Eventually, I came up against my own limitations and poverty and humanity. I fell painfully short of living up to the beautiful Gospel vision I had discovered. I saw myself as a burden on the community and ended up in a situation from which I felt there was no return. It was for me a catastrophic loss of hope.
During this time, I began to see Catherine’s life in a new light. I wouldn’t say that I prayed to her—it was more that she spoke to me, and as she did, I started to hope once more.
Catherine’s Words to Me
I can still remember, in what I think was Catherine’s final interview, her last words, spoken straight to the camera from the depths of her soul: “God loves you! Get that straight! God loves you!”
Anyone can say these words, but Catherine trusted God’s love throughout her own painful life, and she let him carry her. Somehow, this made me able to trust her words in my own pain. It saved my vocation and my life.
Catherine’s life with God
What changed me wasn’t so much what she said as who she was. Catherine Doherty was Russian, and the spirituality of her homeland is deeply Christian, marked by great suffering, an austere existence, a remarkable simplicity, and deep authenticity. It is deeply human and incarnational, and she passed it on in a very personal way to generations of Madonna House members.
Catherine had a strong personality that could be almost overwhelming, but instead of alienating people, she somehow brought them together into a family, a community of love. How did this very human and deeply flawed woman do this? She did it through her surrender to God, her “yes” to God’s will, her perseverance, and her hope.
Her life was a harrowing journey that never really got easier, and it was messy at times. As a young woman, she lived through the Russian Revolution, experiencing war and violence and starvation. She lost her family, her country, and everything she knew and loved. For her, it was like living through the end of the world.
Arriving in North America, she felt like what she called “a stranger in a strange land.” The loss of human dignity she experienced did not make her bitter or fearful but opened her heart to the suffering of Christ in the poor and the lonely, the immigrants and refugees, the rejected and persecuted with whom she identified.
She continued to experience heartbreaking challenges in her family life and in the first two communities she founded in Toronto and Harlem. Twice the Friendship House apostolates she had founded were shattered. In the face of circumstances that could annihilate a person many times over, Catherine Doherty never lost hope. It’s hard to imagine the depth of surrender this involved.
Failure and tragedy can be real opportunities to give ourselves more completely to God, to know his tender pity, to come a little closer to loving as he loves and experiencing the joy of that love in our suffering. Catherine lived this many times.
One of her favorite sayings was “Pain is the kiss of Christ.” She knew in her very bones that God is able to turn defeat into victory, that after darkness comes light, and after death comes resurrection. In the midst of her pain, in what looked and felt like abandonment, in the terrible silence of God, Catherine stood still in hope. And because she never lost hope, Madonna House was born.
When Catherine came to Combermere after the loss of Friendship House, she had no intention of starting another community. She was in a state of tremendous grief and trauma, of what we would now call PTSD. Arriving here, she simply tried to live life, putting one foot in front of the other, and because she loved so deeply, her life continued to be one of service.
Within a few years, many people were coming to these back woods of Ontario to join her, living off the land and serving the local community, especially the poor and the sick. They sensed Christ being born into the world here in a special way. Even priests were joining the community, something she had never thought would happen.
Catherine was a woman of genuine prophetic vision, but Madonna House was not anything she ever would have come up with on her own. When we, the members of Madonna House, take an honest look at ourselves, with our limitations and human weaknesses, and then see the mysterious unfolding of this Apostolate and how it is touching people’s lives, we can only look on it with wonder and immense gratitude.
God does infinitely more than we could hope for or imagine through our poverty and our littleness. Madonna House itself is a sign of hope.
Words of Fire
Why do Catherine’s words hold so much weight? When she speaks, her words are more than words. She shares with us her heart—a heart that knew the fulfilment of hope, God’s victory in the midst of pain. A heart whose identity had been stripped to its core by a life marked by loss, grief, and failure, brought to know its complete, utter poverty and nothingness before God. A heart with no home but the heart of God.
Catherine’s words are spoken out of an entire life poured out for God. A life of hoping in him, of facing pain and, ultimately, the cross of Christ. Through this, she came to know God’s faithfulness. Through the cross came new life.
The words “God loves you! Get that straight!” came from a woman who was living in the resurrection on the other side of the very pain so many of us experience when we are on the verge of losing hope. She knew that if we embrace the cross, we too will live in the resurrection.
The authority, love, and hope behind her words, and the life lived with God that is behind those words, are like fire. Like fire, they have power to transform what they touch into flame. They can change hearts and communicate supernatural hope.
When I had lost all hope on a natural level, Catherine’s words started to mean more to me than they ever had before. They were like an inheritance I had not been able to fully crack open until then. Suddenly the door to the locked vault burst open, and the treasure came pouring out. The inheritance left by Catherine became life for me and gave me the hope I needed to keep beginning again, over and over.
Ultimately, it’s not really about Catherine at all. It is about Christ whom we love and follow.
Ask him for the gift of hope. At least, ask for the desire to hope. God will hear you. God loves to pour himself into a heart that knows its own poverty. He delights in filling emptiness.
His loving hand grasps us tenderly and pulls us with an impossible strength out of the abyss of despair and self-condemnation and gives us a new sense of worth, a new meaning, a new personhood, our true name. Jesus gives us a new heart, the heart of a beloved child, finally able to allow itself to be loved by the Savior.
The fire of Uncreated Love transforms what it touches into itself. It is a fire that is not our own but becomes everything we are. When we have allowed ourselves to be loved by it, we are also allowing it to love all creation through us and to restore all things to Christ.
This is what I have received from Catherine.
[Photo: Louis Stoeckle, Mamie Legris, Catherine Doherty, Therese Richaud at Maryhouse, Yukon visitation in early 1950s. Madonna House Archives]
