They called her the Baroness: the life of Catherine de Hueck Doherty.

Lorene H. Duquin,They called her the Baroness. The Life of Catherine de Hueck Doherty

The word charism or founding charism is much used today with respect to religious institutes and congregations. As Pope John Paul II points out, it must have a three-fold orientation to be true. It must lead to the Father, in the desire to seek His will through a process of unceasing conversion. It must also lead to the Son, fostering an intimate and joyful communion of life with Him. Finally, every true charism leads to the Holy Spirit insofar as it prepares individuals to let themselves be guided and sustained by Him both in their personal spiritual journeys and in their lives of communion and apostolic work (Apostolic letter Via consecrata--On the consecrated life--March 1996, #36).

Constantly seeking the will of God the Father, fostering a joyful union with the Lord Jesus and allowing oneself to be guided by the Holy Spirit is what the extraordinary life of Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty was all about. And some life it was. Born just before the turn of the century into Orthodox Russian nobility during the final reign of the Tsars, she closed her life in a log cabin 85 years later in the forests of Canada, in the midst of her own flourishing Catholic community of men and women vowed to help the urban and rural poor, today known as the Madonna House Apostolate of Combermere, ON.

By the mid-sixties, the Vatican Council's call for renewal gave a stamp of approval to new forms of religious organizations which became known in the Church as "secular institutes." Of this variety, Combermere is certainly a unique species: an outspoken married lay woman in charge of men, women and priests living and working together, something unheard of till then (women and men had always had their strictly separate religious communities). But by that time, too, the Combermere community had adopted the promises of poverty, chastity and obedience (1954) in order to create stability in their work of serving the poor: rural as in Combermere; urban as in many of their other missions throughout the world.

It is not too surprising that the biographer devotes less than one third of the book to the above mentioned post-1954 period of stability. Her consuming interest is her subject's earlier life of seeming total instability: married at age 15 to an effete and dissolute first cousin; running from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to Finlald, England, France; landing in Canada in the late 1920s; starting a "friendship house" for the poor in Toronto and seeing it aborted; trying again among the blacks of Harlem, New York, where she was among the first to confront Catholic discrimination against black people; moving on to the poor in Chicago; then marriage annulment and remarriage, leading to estrangement from her Chicago workers; finally, fleeing in desperation to a property in the Ontario forests to escape from what appeared to have been nothing but false starts in a stubborn lay woman's quest to seek God and serve her neighbour. And there, at last, the Holy Spirit confirmed that all the previous troubles had had a point and purpose after all.

This "life" is full of surprises. And much of it plays itself out on the edge of important social and cultural developments. I found it made for fascinating reading. And it also concerns that rarest of things, a "Canadian" success story within the Church universal. Highly recommended.