Mystery of Incomprehensible Love

The Eucharistic Message of Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament

Catherine de Bar (1614–1698)—in religion, Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament—stands out among the luminous spiritual masters of seventeenth-century France as one of the great teachers of the interior life, a woman of the stature of St Gertrude the Great or St Teresa of Avila. This volume offers, for the first time in English, a substantial introduction to her life and teaching. Living in a period marked by superstition, sacrilege, and war, Mother Mectilde responded with a call to faithful reparation, self-abandoning adoration, frequent Communion, and total adherence to the Eucharistic Lord. Even while she suffered exile, illness, poverty, dangers, and uncertainties on all sides, she offered counsel and comfort to men and women in every state of life, teaching them how to surrender to Divine Providence and how to become ever more united with Christ.

Her writings, steeped in Sacred Scripture and in the liturgical tradition of Benedictine monasticism, reveal a woman of profound human insights and of supernatural wisdom, a sure guide to holiness with a timeless and universal message that seems providential for precisely this moment in history.