Servant of God Sister Marie of St Peter and of the Holy Family, O.C.D.

Life

Perrine Eluère was born on 4 October 1816 in Rennes, Brittany, into a pious working-class Breton family. From childhood she was drawn to Carmel, but her family's circumstances delayed her entrance. She worked as a seamstress and devoted herself to long hours of silent prayer until, on 13 November 1839, she was admitted to the Discalced Carmelite monastery of Tours, taking the name Sister Marie of Saint Peter and of the Holy Family. She made profession on 8 June 1841.

The Carmel of Tours, founded in the spirit of Saint Teresa of Ávila, already had a strong reverence for the Sacred Heart, and Sister Marie's interior life flowed into that current. Beginning in 1843, and especially through the years 1844–1847, she reported a sustained series of interior locutions from Jesus concerning two great evils of the age — blasphemy and the profanation of Sunday — which she described as 'poisoned arrows' wounding the Heart of God. Christ, she reported, asked for reparation through veneration of his Holy Face, the Face once 'covered with confusion' in the Passion, and gave her the prayer that has become known as the Golden Arrow.

Weakened by tuberculosis and by the intense penances she imposed on herself, Sister Marie died at Tours on 8 July 1848, only thirty-one years old. The devotion she had received was taken up by the layman Léon Dupont and spread worldwide; it was formally approved by Pope Leo XIII in 1885 and given a feast on Shrove Tuesday by Pope Pius XII in 1958. Her cause for beatification has been opened and she bears the title Servant of God.