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Chapter  ‘‘My Spirit Found a Unity with This Holy Man’’ A Nun’s Visions and the Negotiation of Pain and Power in Seventeenth-Century New France emma anderson On the 25th of September, 1662, after communion, I thought that I saw before me Father Brébeuf, all brilliant with light, wearing a crown shining with glory, and in the place of his heart a dove as white as snow, which showed the gentleness and meekness which this servant of God has demonstrated during his life. This dove had written on each of the great feathers of his wings the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and the eight beatitudes. In one hand he carried a palm, and in the other he pointed at the said dove. He was wearing a long alb and he had a stole of golden embroidery and gleaming white pearls, and seemed to me to be all surrounded by rays of light.1 It was in these imposing terms that Catherine de Saint-Augustin, a young Hospitalière nun in 1662 Québec, first envisioned Jean de Brébeuf, the deceased Jesuit missionary who was to be, for the last six years of her life, her spiritual mentor and celestial director from beyond the grave. Though Catherine, as a newly professed sixteen-year-old, arrived in Canada from Normandy almost exactly seven months before Brébeuf’s gruesome slaying by Iroquois invaders in March 1649, the two never met in the flesh. This otherworldly vision inaugurated a mystical relationship that would, in the last years of Catherine’s life, bring together preoccupations that had long dominated her spirituality and imbue them with a new, galvanizing meaning 186 Intercultural Encounter and purpose. Her spiritual relationship with Brébeuf, whom she saw as a martyr of Christ and the celestial protector of Canada, would lead Catherine increasingly to perceive and present herself as his spiritual heir, and imaginatively to recast in feminized terms what had been, in this colonial context, the masculine path of martyrdom. At Brébeuf’s behest, Catherine would sculpt for herself a secret role as a voluntary victim for Canada, sinlessly suffering at the hands of demons to deflect God’s righteous anger away from her beloved adopted country, and to redeem it from its sin and apostasy. Catherine’s determination to share with Brébeuf his task of protecting and preserving Canada’s religious integrity had several important effects. Her visionary presentation of the deceased Jesuit missionary as a powerful thaumaturgical figure passionately engaged in the spiritual defense of the beleaguered colony helped to establish Brébeuf’s enduring cult in New France and beyond.2 But even as she shaped his post-mortem image, Catherine ’s association with Brébeuf gave her entrance to otherwise inaccessible masculine corridors of power during her lifetime, and positioned her for veneration alongside her martyred mentor after her own death. Catherine’s double life as a model seventeenth-century nursing sister who nightly traversed the veil separating the living and the dead, leaving terrestrial for celestial realms, allowed her at once to exemplify and thwart the gendered religious expectations of her time. Her transposition of martyrdom into terms more befitting her life as a cloistered Hospitalière nun entailed the substitution of demonic for aboriginal tormentors, underlining the already widely perceived equivalence between demons and native peoples in the early modern colonial imagination. Studying the highly charged visionary encounter between Jean de Brébeuf and Catherine de Saint-Augustin has the potential to reveal much about midseventeenth -century Catholic mysticism in both its universal and local dimensions. The importance, for Catherine, of the communion of saints and her experiential affirmation of the reality of invisible, cosmic worlds, both angelic and demonic, reveals the continuing power of traditional paradigms in the inner lives of Catholics amidst the conceptual chaos of Protestant challenge and Trentian rebuttals. Catherine’s pronounced emphasis upon the necessity of reparative suffering illustrates the continuing relevance, in French mysticism, of the ideas of Jean Eudes and Louis Lalemant. But Catherine’s stress on endurance also reflects the realities of life in mid-seventeenthcentury Canada, where endemic violence and chronic uncertainty prompted missionaries—male and female—to view themselves as living martyrs. E (2024-04-16 07:02 GMT) A Nun’s Visions 187 Without a doubt, the emotional glue that most closely bound Catherine to her celestial mentor, Jean de Brébeuf, was what she perceived as their shared experience...

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