78. The Daughters Who Strengthened the Shepherds

"Help those women who have laboured with me in the gospel." - Philippians 4:3

St. Catherine of Siena was not an isolated exception. Across the centuries, holy women have prayed for priests, sustained missionaries, advised bishops, admonished negligent prelates, assisted works of reform, protected the Mass, encouraged vocations, and offered their sufferings for the sanctification of the clergy. Some served in public crises; many more worked in silence known only to God.

Their witness fills an important gap in Catholic formation. The Church does not teach that women must imitate the sacramental office of men in order to serve her greatly. Nor does she reduce women to passive spectators whenever clergy are involved. She shows something richer: the priesthood and the distinct vocations of women remain what God made them, while the members of Christ assist one another through supernatural charity.

This assistance must be understood accurately. A holy woman does not acquire jurisdiction because her counsel is wise. A private revelation does not become doctrine because a saint received it. Frank speech does not confer authority to govern a diocese, judge a sacrament, or command a pope. Yet neither office nor dignity makes a shepherd incapable of receiving truth, encouragement, correction, prayer, or practical help from a woman whom God has made holy.

The history of the saints therefore gives neither clerical flattery nor rebellion. It gives ordered cooperation beneath Christ.

The Gospel itself names women who followed Our Lord and ministered to Him from their substance. They did not become Apostles, but their material charity assisted the apostolic mission. At the Passion, the holy women remained near when many fled. On Easter morning, they carried love and fidelity toward the tomb and received the angelic announcement that Christ had risen.^1

The apostolic writings preserve the same pattern. St. Paul commends Phoebe for assisting many, including himself; Prisca and Aquila risked themselves for his life; Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, Euodia, Syntyche, and other women labored in the Gospel. Their work did not erase the order of the Church. It served that order by helping the truth travel, communities endure, and souls receive the Faith.^2

Above all stands the Blessed Virgin Mary. At Cana she places a real need before Our Lord and directs the servants to obey Him. At Calvary she remains beside the Sacrifice and receives St. John, Apostle and priest, as her son. In the Cenacle she perseveres in prayer with the Apostles before Pentecost. She neither replaces Christ nor claims the apostolic office. Her maternal presence is wholly receptive, obedient, steadfast, and fruitful. Every Catholic form of spiritual motherhood must remain beneath hers and lead, as she does, to Jesus Christ.^3

The holy women who strengthened shepherds did not all perform the same work. Their assistance included:

• persevering prayer and penance for priests;
• material support for missions, churches, seminaries, and the poor;
• protection of priests during persecution;
• encouragement in exhaustion, danger, or discouragement;
• testimony about conditions a shepherd needed to know;
• counsel offered with humility and candor;
• cooperation in works of religious reform;
• the formation of sons and students for priestly vocations;
• reparation for sacrilege, coldness, and clerical sin;
• and, in extraordinary cases, grave admonition addressed to bishops or popes.

They did not confer orders, absolve sins, offer the Holy Sacrifice, teach by possession of the Church's magisterial office, or govern merely because they were devout. Their sanctity made their service more faithful; it did not change the divine constitution of the Church.

This distinction protects both truths. Women can render immense service to the priesthood, and the priesthood remains a sacramental office received through Holy Orders by men called and ordained by the Church. Catholic cooperation does not require confusion.

St. Monica did not live to see St. Augustine ordained a priest or consecrated a bishop. She nevertheless helped give the Church that priest, bishop, and Doctor through years of prayer, tears, truthful opposition to his errors, and refusal to despair of his conversion. She loved her son too much to call his heresy harmless or his immorality a stage of self-discovery.

Her motherhood joined firmness to confidence in grace. She sought help from bishops, followed St. Augustine across distance, and prayed until the son who had wounded her faith stood beside her as a baptized Catholic. At Ostia their final conversation rose toward eternal life; shortly afterward she died, her great earthly petition answered.^4

St. Monica teaches mothers that the formation of priests can begin long before a seminary. A Catholic home that teaches doctrine, reverences the Mass, honors true priests, corrects sin, and prays for vocations may be preparing a shepherd for souls. Even when a child wanders, a mother can continue to labor without minimizing the danger or attempting to control grace.

See also St. Monica and Tears That Do Not Compromise.

St. Hildegard of Bingen corresponded with popes, bishops, abbots, priests, religious communities, and rulers. Her letters include exhortations to Pope Anastasius IV and other prelates to correct abuses and exercise their duties courageously. She spoke with unusual force, but she did not set herself up as a rival hierarchy. Her writings were examined, her mission remained subject to ecclesiastical judgment, and her admonitions called officeholders to fulfill the office they already possessed.^5

St. Bridget of Sweden likewise addressed popes and pleaded for reform, peace, and the return of the papacy to Rome. She spoke against clerical corruption and worldly delay because she understood that the sins of shepherds wound the flock. Her severity was not contempt for priesthood. It arose from reverence for what priests and prelates ought to be before God.^6

These saints establish an important rule. To expose clerical sin merely to enjoy scandal is detraction or cruelty. To flatter clerical sin because the offender possesses office is false obedience. Holy admonition seeks repentance, protection of souls, and restoration of right order. It speaks from evidence, remains within duty, accepts legitimate judgment, and refuses to turn correction into self-importance.

St. Catherine of Siena gave this pattern its most dramatic expression. Her correspondence reaches priests, religious, cardinals, rulers, Pope Gregory XI, and Pope Urban VI. She pleaded for peace, the reform of clergy, courage in papal government, the return to Rome, and fidelity during the Western Schism. She could address a pope with filial tenderness and then warn him against fear, weak counselors, favoritism, and failure to correct corrupt shepherds.^7

Her conduct cannot be reduced to the slogan that she single-handedly brought the pope back from Avignon. Gregory XI had considered returning before her embassy, and political and ecclesiastical forces were already at work. Her influence was nevertheless real: she encouraged his better resolution, confronted the fears surrounding it, served as a mediator, and continued pressing for reform after the return.

The heart of her witness is not bold personality. It is crucified charity. She prayed, fasted, served the sick, labored for reconciliation, sought the salvation of those she corrected, and repeatedly asked blessings from the very pastors she admonished. She spoke upward without pretending to stand above.

Read her individual witness in St. Catherine of Siena and Truth Spoken to Corrupt Power.

St. Teresa of Avila worked with priests in the reform of Carmel. She received direction, submitted extraordinary experiences to examination, sought learned confessors, and recognized that prayer must be protected from illusion by Catholic doctrine. At the same time, her judgment, experience, foundations, and fidelity strengthened the priests laboring with her, including St. John of the Cross and Father Jerónimo Gracián.^8

This cooperation was not sentimental companionship. It was ordered toward observance, prayer, poverty, discipline, and the salvation of souls. The reform asked sacrifice from everyone involved. St. Teresa's maternity did not soften the rule; it helped souls return to it.

St. Jane Frances de Chantal and St. Francis de Sales reveal another form of holy cooperation. He was her spiritual father and bishop; she received his direction and obeyed the design of the Visitation. Yet she also became the prudent foundress upon whose strength, judgment, perseverance, and fidelity the new institute depended. Their surviving letters show real human trials brought beneath obedience, and a work neither could have accomplished in the same way alone.^9

The lesson is reciprocal but not interchangeable. A priest may direct a woman while also receiving encouragement from her fidelity. A bishop may establish and govern a work while relying upon a foundress to embody its rule. Grace joins distinct duties without dissolving them.

For the fuller rule of reform, continue with St. Teresa of Avila and Reform by Return, Not Compromise.

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque's mission concerning the Sacred Heart advanced amid testing, humiliation, obedience, and the assistance of St. Claude de la Colombière. He helped discern and support the work; she in turn prayed, suffered, and participated in a mission that called priests and faithful away from coldness toward Eucharistic love and reparation.^10

This reveals a service deeper than advice. Priests need souls who make reparation for sacrilege, tepidity, cowardice, and sins committed near holy things. Such reparation does not excuse guilt or conceal danger. It places the wound beneath the Precious Blood while asking that sinners repent and that priests become holy.

Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness; yet hatred of heresy must begin within the soul itself. A woman who wishes to help priests must reject error, false worship, compromise, pride, possessiveness, curiosity, and self-will in herself. Otherwise even apparent zeal for the clergy can become another form of disorder.^11

See St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and Reparation to the Sacred Heart.

St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus shows how great assistance can remain almost entirely hidden. Under obedience, she was entrusted with two missionary brothers. She prayed and sacrificed for them, corresponded with them, offered suffering for apostolic labor, and extended that intention to missionaries and priests throughout the Church.^12

She did not imagine herself directing their priesthood. She explicitly understood prayer and sacrifice as the principal means by which she helped them, and she guarded the correspondence by obedience so that zeal would not become distraction. Her example corrects both activism and passivity. A cloistered nun who never entered the mission field could still labor for missionaries because charity made their work present to her prayer.

This is spiritual sisterhood without intrusion. It neither seeks attention from priests nor treats hidden prayer as insignificant. It gives Christ the sacrifice and asks Him to strengthen the priest, protect his purity, make his preaching fruitful, sustain him beneath the Cross, and bring the souls entrusted to him into grace.

Because this vocation is beautiful, it can also be counterfeited. Not every intense attachment to a priest is spiritual motherhood. Not every criticism of a bishop is prophetic courage. Not every private impression is a message from God.

The following corruptions must be rejected:

• flattery that makes a priest comfortable in negligence;
• gossip disguised as concern for the Church;
• emotional possessiveness toward a priest or religious;
• seeking private importance through privileged access;
• treating spiritual direction as a substitute for ordinary duties;
• claiming revelations in order to pressure a confessor or superior;
• correcting publicly when no duty requires publicity;
• withholding evidence of grave danger while calling silence charity;
• contempt for the priestly office because a priest has sinned;
• and blind defense of a cleric merely because he is admired.

Priests must also preserve fatherly boundaries. They must not cultivate dependence, favoritism, secrecy, or emotional intimacy inconsistent with celibacy and pastoral prudence. A holy collaboration makes both souls more obedient to God and more faithful to duty. An unhealthy attachment makes truth harder to speak, duties easier to neglect, and separation feel like betrayal.

The saints submitted even extraordinary things to testing. Ordinary Catholics have still more reason to distrust self-exaltation, seek sound judgment, state facts carefully, and remain within the obligations God has actually given them.

The present crisis does not make this work less necessary. It makes purity of intention more necessary. Women and girls can assist true priests and priestly vocations through a complete rule of charity:

• pray the Rosary and offer Masses, Communions, fasting, penance, illness, and daily duties for the sanctification and perseverance of priests;
• make reparation for sacrilege, false worship, doctrinal betrayal, and sins committed against the Sacred Heart;
• teach children to honor the priesthood without idolizing individual priests;
• encourage genuine vocations in sons, brothers, students, and young men without attempting to manufacture a vocation;
• support true priests materially according to real need and one's means;
• assist missions, chapels, catechesis, vestment work, care of sacred linens, hospitality, and works of mercy with reverence and competence;
• defend a priest against demonstrably false accusations while refusing to excuse proven wrongdoing;
• give necessary information truthfully, without embellishment or malice;
• encourage weary priests to remain faithful to doctrine, the Mass, confession, prayer, study, and pastoral duty;
• and accept hiddenness when another person can perform the visible work better.

No woman must wait for correspondence with a missionary or access to a bishop before beginning. A mother teaching the catechism, a widow offering loneliness, a religious keeping her rule, a young woman guarding purity, a worker giving alms, and a sick woman offering pain can all strengthen the priesthood before God.

This work must reach beyond supporting pleasant or personally affirming priests. Pray for the zealous and the weary, the isolated and the persecuted, the learned and the struggling, the tempted and the fallen. Pray for repentance where there is sin, courage where there is fear, sound doctrine where there is confusion, and final perseverance in every true priest.

When circumstances genuinely require a woman to counsel or correct a priest or prelate, the saints suggest a sober rule:

1. Pray and examine whether the matter is fact, inference, preference, or rumor.
2. Ask whether speaking belongs to charity and duty, or merely satisfies agitation.
3. State the truth accurately, with necessary evidence and without exaggeration.
4. Address the proper person and preserve privacy unless protection of souls truly requires wider action.
5. Distinguish the sacred office from the personal fault of its bearer.
6. Seek correction and salvation, not humiliation or victory.
7. Refuse obedience to sin while preserving obedience in everything lawful.
8. Accept that truthful counsel may be ignored, and continue fulfilling one's own duties before God.

St. Catherine could speak forcefully because she had first permitted grace to war against self-love in her own soul. Without that inward battle, severity easily becomes pride. Without hatred of heresy, gentleness becomes complicity. Catholic speech must possess both truth and charity because both belong to Christ.

The daughters who strengthened the shepherds did not seek another priesthood. They loved the priesthood Christ instituted. Because they loved it, they prayed for priests, served them, encouraged them, warned them, made reparation for them, and sometimes called the highest shepherds back to courage.

St. Monica gave the Church her tears before the Church received St. Augustine's preaching. St. Hildegard and St. Bridget called prelates to reform. St. Catherine of Siena spoke filial truth to popes. St. Teresa of Avila and St. Jane Frances de Chantal helped works of reform take flesh. St. Margaret Mary answered coldness with reparation. St. Thérèse carried missionaries within hidden prayer.

Their works differed, but their order was one: Christ first, the Catholic Faith entire, the priesthood reverenced, sin neither flattered nor hated in the person, duty fulfilled, and souls sought for eternity.

For the priestly side of this cooperation, continue with St. John Vianney and the Priesthood of Sacrifice and Our Lady of Sorrows for Mothers, Priests, and the Remnant.