.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux had 4 siblings who died in infancy,
and she was taught by her priests that they were certainly
saints in heaven because they had been baptized. Their
names are in
Story of A Soul, her quasi-autobiography,
but this aspect is not thoroughly explained there due to
the fact that she did not write that "book" with the intention
of it becoming a best-selling publication worldwide a few
years after her too-young death (24 yrs.) and many more
years before she was canonized a saint only 28 years
after her death, but it is thoroughly explained in the most
excellent preparatory work,
"The Little Flower" by the
eminent Irish lady author, Mary Fabyan Windeatt, God bless
her soul!
She had a special name for them, but I don't recall what it
was. She used to pray to them by name, and encouraged
the rest of her family to do likewise. Some commentators
say it's possible that those 4 babies are the secret to the
Little Flower's great intuition regarding simple holiness.
Therefore, this applies to any such baptized child who dies
in infancy, or, that is, before the age of reason, which is
generally thought to be 5 or 6, however, some children
younger than that have demonstrated a great ability to
reason. One of them was St. Alphonse de Liguori, if I'm
not mistaken, or maybe another saint living around that
time period, who at 4 years of age refused to eat his
dinner with the family and ran away to his room, when a
visiting guest had started eating before grace before meals
was prayed, and had made a joke about it. His mother
followed him and attempted to console him and encouraged
him to return to the table, but he steadfastly refused to
"eat with a heretic." Imagine that, at 4 years of age!
I wonder how many adults could do such a thing.
Another one was
Ven. Anne de Guigné, whose canonization
is oddly delayed (there must be something 'inconvenient'
for the agenda of Newchurch in her story), who immediately
grasped most obscure concepts in theology, and never
needed to be told twice about questions of morality. Once
she understood that something was forbidden by God,
she would absolutely devote ALL of her energy to avoiding
it, and when she became aware that something was God's
will, she immediately devoted ALL of her effort to obeying
it. Before she was 5 she wanted to receive Holy Communion,
and the local diocese assigned a certain qualified priest to
the task of interrogating her. After some 15 minutes of her
non-stop correct answers on the basics of the Faith, he tried
to slip in a 'curve ball' with this question:
He had been asking her about man's obedience to God,
and the perfection of Our Lord's obedience, even unto
death on the Cross (remember, at 5 years old). Then
he suddenly asked her, "Is God ever obedient to man?"
Without a moment's pause, little Anne replied, that of
course He is, every time the priest consecrates the host
at Mass, God obeys man! At that point, the priest gave
up, saying that if there is any shortcoming in this little
girl's readiness to receive the Blessed Sacrament, it is
far beyond his ability to discover what it is.
Anne died when she was only 11, in 1922, after having
been receiving Communion for 6 years. She had most
likely never so much as heard about the apparitions at
Fatima, which had occurred in Portugal, only a few hundred
miles from her home in France. In subsequent years,
investigators, one after another, came away from the case
saying that she appeared to have been given spiritual insights
directly from God, for she had consistently known answers
to difficult theological questions about which no one in this
world had ever spoken to her. That is the only way, they
say, such answers as the one about God obeying man, could
have been something that she had previously thought about,
for her immediate answer belies her pre-existing thought on
the matter, for the Holy Ghost must have given her some
preparation for that question, as well as others, something
like how
St. Joseph of Cupertino was utterly unable to
memorize any of Scripture, and had been terrified of his
examination, when he would be asked to do his best repeating
a particular passage by memory, but they would not tell him
in advance even so much as which book of the Bible would
be used. But there was only one exception, one chapter of
one book that he was able to remember, and it is known
what that was, if you look it up. So he went to his
examination, putting all his faith in God that he would be able
to satisfy his interrogators. When it came to that part, the
young Joseph was incredulous when they asked him to
repeat the first few verses of that one chapter that he had
indeed memorized. Since he was in such shock, the
examiners started to make bad marks on their score sheets,
to the effect that he had failed, but then, after recovering
from his shock, he began to recite it, slowly at first, and then
faster, and when the examiners had heard enough, and asked
him to stop, he was so excited that he was in the middle of
a most dramatic proclamation of the Gospel that his
countenance shown a bright glow and his words ran on with
hardly a breath, and his voice got louder and he went into a
kind of ecstasy that alarmed the examiners.
Suddenly he was relieved, and calmed down, not by any mere
human cause, for he was quite out of himself at the time, but
by the intercession of the Holy Ghost, in order not to upset
the examiners. Joseph could later hardly recall what had
happened, and we only know it did because the examiners
explained it in detail. Later in life, he would become 'prone'
(pun intended!) to levitation during his consecration of the
Eucharist at Mass, and not by any small means. He would
drift up into the rafters of the church, and sometimes would
move about over the entire congregation, seemingly unaware
of the fact that it was going on. In fact, it was phenomena
such as this in which the tradition is rooted whereby the altar
servers in the CTLM, behind the priest, hold up the hem of his
cassock when he elevates the host and the chalice. His long
and well-established history of astounding "flights" at the
consecration hundreds of years before the "Wright Brothers
were right," would become the cause of his being named the
patron saint of aviators, because,
St. Joseph of Cupertino is the patron saint of 'THOSE WHO FLY.'
Topic: Deceased Baptized Children (Read 1053 times)