MODERN SAINT OF VOCATIONS

Most religious orders are praying for vocations these days. Here is an order of nuns who found a young woman to intercede for them.  Perhaps we all need to find our intercessor!

 SERVANT of GOD CLAIRE de CASTELBAJA was born in Paris in 1953, the youngest of five.  From a young age she  was known to be prayerful, generous, and passionate, with a love for life.

Into her teens, she found the social and political changes of the 1960s deeply unsettling. To counteract some of this, she formed the Chorale Claire de Castelbajac, which continues to this day.

She was accepted as a foreign student at the Central Institute of Restoration in Rome.  She was even more distressed by the youth of her generation.

“The only thing that interests them is pleasure in all its forms. So that depresses me and disgusts me a little. Sometimes, when I see the people around me, I think to myself that it wouldn’t be so bad to be like them. Then I pray to have the courage, I could even say sometimes the heroism, to resist.”

But like so many young people, she found it hard to resist the troubled times. Fortunately, her falling away was short-lived and she returned to the Church.  She would turn back to Christ and to the Church.

She once remarked to a nun: “I would like to give happiness to all those I approach and sow joy. Thérèse of Lisieux expected to be in heaven to make others happy. I want to do it on earth.”

Her work in restoration took her to the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi where  she worked on two frescoes. While there in  January of 1975, she fell gravely ill with meningoencephalitis, a serious neurological condition consisting in inflammation of the brain and surrounding tissues.

Knowing that her condition was terminal, she told her mother: “I am so happy that if I died now, I believe I would go straight to Heaven, since Heaven means praising God, and I’m already there!”  She offered her suffering up for the world, after an intense life of prayer.

In her letters, journals, and writings can be seen the depth of her spiritual life. 

The Cisterian Abbey of Sainte Marie “de Boular ” (Closest city is Toulouse in SW France) was suffering from a shortage of vocations for 30 years, so decided to pray to Claire. The prioress was a childhood friend of Claire’s mother.  She had the Cistercian Abbot General read a collection of letters from Claire.  He decided, in the opening of the cause of beatification of Claire, to ask the nuns to pray for five new vocations during the year 1981. Five young women actually presented themselves that year. Since then one to two per year enter. 

The community also welcomed, until her death in 2005, the mother of Claire de Castelbajac. The tomb of the young servant of God is also in this monastery.

As a result of the increase in the community, the monastery in 1998, sent nuns to the Abbey of Rieunette, near Narbonne (SW of Montpellier), abandoned since the Revolution. In 2021, the community of Boulaur has thirty-one sisters, whose average age is only forty-three.

The monastery's agricultural project is ambitious; it is committed to an organic farming approach, an approach further reinforced since the encyclical "Laudato Si' in 2015. The orchard is notably in permaculture . At the beginning of 2020, the sisters broadcast a video on the Internet in which they explain the project they have to build "a Cistercian barn of the 21st century". This building will allow them to quintuple their production with twenty-five cows, a dozen pigs, workshops, a cheese dairy (with Jersey cows), a delicatessen, a reception area and an exhibition hall.