By Fernand Jette, O.M.I.

Published by Sheed & Ward

1963, Hardcover, 180 pages

USED – Condition – Fair. Dust jacket good, but has some staining. Readable copy which has substantial underlining.

To most American Catholics, “Mere Marie of the Ursulines” is remembered, if at al, as one of the great heroines of our missionary past. The first missionary nun to come to the wilderness of New France, she exhibited a courage and holiness which give her a deserved place in missionary history by the side of the great Jesuit missioners and martyrs who were her contemporaries.

But there was another – and even more significant – side to this remarkable woman. She was a contemplative as well as an activist, a master of the spiritual life as well as an administrator of broad vision and an educator of regrettably rare sensitivity to the real needs of both teachers and the taught. She was, in short, a great spiritual writer and director of souls.

It is this neglected – indeed, almost unknown – Mother Mary who emerges from pages of this book. Father Jette has skillfully and lovingly set forth her spiritual teaching in such a way that the modern reader is brought once more into vital contact with the spirit and spirituality of an authentic human being “open to God” on every level of her varied life as wife, mother, religious, missioner.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard Father Jette’s work in restoring to us “the spiritual teaching of Mother Mary of the Incarnation” as an interesting but ultimately irrelevant historical exercise. Despite the centuries which separate her from us, Mother Mary was surprisingly – and rewardingly – “modern”. On almost every page there gleams some gem of her hard-won wisdom concerning that most delicate and dramatic of situations – God’s quest for the human soul even as the soul seeks for God.

Anyone in our day who takes that quest seriously will find in Mother Mary an understanding but challenging guide. (From the inside front of the dust jacket)