Tis_Bearself
Patron
So last night I went to the local Flame of Love prayer cenacle which is held at a fairly progressive parish and run by an elderly deacon who has impressed me as being a pious, devout and prayerful man (this is not true of all deacons I’ve ever met). During the cenacle, the deacon spoke on what seemed to be contemplative prayer (without using the term) and talked about St. Francis de Sales and then some historical Catholics who weren’t saints but whose spirituality was influenced by St. Francis de Sales. One of the people the deacon talked about for several minutes was Madame Guyon, who he said was “imprisoned by the Church for seven years” including a couple in solitary, and she used prayer/ her relationship with God to get her through this hardship.
I hadn’t heard of this person before and was wondering how someone would go from being imprisoned by the Church to being praised at a holy hour for her prayer life and held up as a model for Catholics, so I looked her up and it appears from what I read she got in the middle of one of those power struggles involving some bishops, the Pope and Louis XIV and not only was she imprisoned but was regularly threatened with being burnt at the stake for heresy. Her writings also ended up on the Church’s forbidden book list. I am rather dim I know, but it’s hard for me to understand how simply praying in a contemplative way gets you all this grief (it’s not like she invented it since she studied St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis de Sales). She also remained loyal to the Catholic Church her whole life despite all this mess and died in the Church.
Anybody familiar with this lady? I couldn’t find anything where the Church had ever said maybe they were wrong to persecute her. I note that Google Search brought up a past CAF thread on her but it apparently didn’t survive the move as the link comes up as “doesn’t exist or is private”, so I don’t know what was said before on here.
I hadn’t heard of this person before and was wondering how someone would go from being imprisoned by the Church to being praised at a holy hour for her prayer life and held up as a model for Catholics, so I looked her up and it appears from what I read she got in the middle of one of those power struggles involving some bishops, the Pope and Louis XIV and not only was she imprisoned but was regularly threatened with being burnt at the stake for heresy. Her writings also ended up on the Church’s forbidden book list. I am rather dim I know, but it’s hard for me to understand how simply praying in a contemplative way gets you all this grief (it’s not like she invented it since she studied St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis de Sales). She also remained loyal to the Catholic Church her whole life despite all this mess and died in the Church.
Anybody familiar with this lady? I couldn’t find anything where the Church had ever said maybe they were wrong to persecute her. I note that Google Search brought up a past CAF thread on her but it apparently didn’t survive the move as the link comes up as “doesn’t exist or is private”, so I don’t know what was said before on here.
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