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BOOK REVIEWS107 then let's hasten to translate her for other waiting and watching admirers. Sister Mary Edith, O. P. * Maryknoll Teachers College Maryknoll, New York. The Spiritual Legacy of Sister Mary of the Holy Trinity. Edited by Silvere Van den Broek, O.F.M. Translated from the French. Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1950. Pp. 364. $3.50. "Write the story of your vocation quickly, without delay and without lingering over it," Our Lord said to Sister Mary of the Holy Trinity in the spring of 1942; and again, "I have other more important messages to give you afterward" (note 510). About one third of this book contains the simple, compelling narrative of the conversion of Louisa Jacques, born in Pretoria, Transvaal , of French-Swiss Protestant parents in 1901, and of the sufferings which God permitted her to endure in her long search for a cloistered community willing to accept her in spite of her extremely delicate constitution. The account of her life, according to the command of Christ, is brief and comes to a close rather suddenly with a paragraph or two on her acceptance into the Poor Clare Convent at Jerusalem oh June 30, 1938, and the pronouncement of her vows two years later. The remainder of the volume is devoted to a careful edilion of lhe some six hundred communications which Our Lord made to her between January, 1940, and her death in June, 1942. The greater portion of these Notes date from the last few months of her life. The late Fr. Silverius Van den Broek, O.F.M., who edited and published the autobiography and Notes which form the spiritual legacy of Sister Mary of the Holy Trinity and who was her confessor in the last year of her life, has done an invaluable service especially to religious in making available her life and intimate conversations with Jesus. There is scarcely a page which is not rich in material for meditation, spiritual reading, self-examination and resolution. One is minded in reflecting on these communications of similar appeals for love which the Divine Lover has made * Sister M. Edith, dean and professor of history at Maryknoll Teachers College, did special studies on St. Joan of Arc in connection with her Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies at the Pontifical Institute of Toronto. She is at present engaged in studies on the conciliar theories of the fifteenth century, and in making a critical edition of the Summa de Ecclesia of the Spanish theologian and canonist, Juan de Torquemada, to appear within a year or two. 108BOOK REVIEWS through the centuries and particularly in our own times to Sister Josefa Menendez and to Sister Marie Cécile of Rome, it is a tender appeal for total and unlimited love especially on the part of consecrated souls, priests and religious. It would seem that through Sister Mary Christ would have us know in a new and special manner His gentleness, His immense personal love for us plus the simple truth that only our own lack of confidence and generosity, our hesitancy to surrender to Him, can set limits to the redeeming and transforming work of His love in our souls. "This is the only reality," Christ said to this daughter of St. Clare, "I love you and I take care of you. And thai is for now and for eternily . . . Bul refuse Me nolhing. Do not leave Me for a moment — I Who am always with you ... I seek a heart whose love for Me is boundless, a will fused in My will, a spirit so devoid of selfishness that My Spirit can take possession of it, and reign there as King. Will you be thai heart, thai will, that spirit? . . . Rest in Me. Depend on Me" (Notes 5; 14; 18; 71). The particular message which God seems to desire to communicate through these revelations and that which constitutes perhaps the greatest treasure of the spiritual legacy of this chosen soul is His ardent longing for a whole legion of souls in every walk of life who will vow themselves to a faithful imitation of the Eucharistie life of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament: to be hidden, immolated , silent...

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