The "Faithful Servant and Perfect Friend" of Jesus

While he’s not on the U.S. Church calendar of saints with memorials, obligatory or optional, he is important to me as a Jesuit and director of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network (Apostleship of Prayer). Today we are celebrating the feast of St. Claude la Colombiere.  He was the Jesuit spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary, the Visitation nun to whom Jesus appeared and revealed his Sacred Heart on fire with love for humanity. 

I’ve always enjoyed the fact that he died and is celebrated on the day after Valentine’s Day. All those Valentine hearts are nice expressions of love but the deepest and truest love the world has ever known is found in another heart—the Heart of Jesus. 

Recently I gave a mission at three clustered parishes in the Brawley, California area—St. Joseph in Westmorland and, in Brawley, St. Margaret Mary and Sacred Heart where there is a statue of the visionary to the left of the sanctuary and a painting in the parish hall.

When Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary, he told her that he was going to send his “faithful servant and perfect friend,” Fr. Colombiere to confirm the apparitions and to help her spread devotion to his Sacred Heart.  

When St. Margaret Mary protested that she was “a wretched creature, a poor sinner whose very unworthiness would be capable even of preventing of accomplishment” of his desire, he told her:

“Ah, poor innocent that you are, don’t you know that I make use of the weakest subjects to confound the strong, that it is ordinarily the smallest and the poor in spirit to whom I make my power visible with greater brilliance, so that they will not attribute anything to themselves?”

St. Claude wrote those words down in his spiritual journal.  He continued with these words to St. Margaret Mary in which Jesus refers to St. Claude, designated by “N”:

“It was then that He told me: ‘Turn to my servant N. and tell him from Me to do all he can to establish this devotion and to give this pleasure to My divine heart. Tell him not to be discouraged by the difficulties he will meet with, for they will not be lacking.  But he must learn that he is all-powerful who completely distrusts himself to place his trust in Me alone.’”

May we follow the example of these two saints and place all our trust in the Sacred Heart of Jesus!