My Beloved Is Mine and I Am His: Meditations on Brideship for Women Religious

by Mother Mary Francis P.C.C.

Brideship, writes Mother Mary Francis, p.c.c., is “not a popular word” in the context of the consecrated life—thanks to the saccharine, pseudo-mystical treatment it has often received in the past. Yet this treatment and the adverse reactions to it flow from a lamentable misunderstanding of Divine Revelation. In the Church, as Pope St. John Paul II describes in Vita consecrata , vowed women religious are “a special eschatological image of the Heavenly Bride and of the life to come.” Identifying the four elements of brideship as presence, focus, service, and surrender, and their roots in Scripture and manifestation in religious life, Mother Mary Francis echoes these profound “We are the spouses of Christ. We are covenanted people called to do this for Christ and his Church.” Describing with poignant and heartfelt conviction the beauty of brideship in the covenant of religious profession, My Beloved Is Mine and I Am His is a beautiful treatment of the wondrous height, depth, and breadth of God’s love for the soul he chooses as his own.

162 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2022

Reviews

[Meg Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

“‘Like Jesus, lose rather your life than your obedience’…every evil comes from disobedience” (149).

…….this was wonderful😭 No I am not discerning religious life but simply, as a woman, I am a bride of Christ. Point blank period. & as a woman who will probably get married & have a physical spouse on earth, there were many things that Mother Mary Francis says that are applicable to me/women discerning marriage. & just fire words of advice & truth. Highly highly recommend for all of my women !!!!!

[Bianca Huet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is gorgeous! Mother Mary Francis speaks to the very core of what it means to be a woman and a bride. While it’s intended for women religious, I think all Catholic women would benefit from praying with this book. There’s so much to learn from religious life, and she emphasizes the reality that your vocation is meant to make you come alive. To be a bride is to follow the Bridegroom.

“There is nothing a woman cannot do when she knows that she is perfectly understood at all times and that she is loved.”

I love being His bride.

[Sarah Furka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t get enough of this book. It teaches not only the values and sacredness of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but further, teaches women how to be BETTER AND MORE CONFIDENT WOMEN. There are so many spiritual nuggets in here I hope to come back to again and again. To offer some perspective: This book is 152 pages…all of these quotes are from page 1-36….pick up this book. It’ll convict and edify you.

“There is, after all, no basic difference between the woman too occupied with her social life or her career to be a mother to her children, and the religious woman too occupied with self-perfecting or pet projects to be a font of maternal compassion for others."

"Saint Catherine of Siena, when she was tormented by many temptations, cried out to the tempter, 'But the citadel is taken!' A little hymn I wrote once for sisters making solemn vows had this line in it: 'I have been spoken for by the Lord, most High King...'”

“When a religious will not rise to an occasion, when she flies apart with irritation, when her tongue becomes a two-edged sword of complaints and excuses, then she is poor, then she is needy. If her sisters fail to open the arms of compassion and stretch out the hands of sympathy and understanding to her weakness, it is because they are not adept at motherhood. If they react to her faults and failings with cold withdrawal and politely righteous indications of shock, they reveal themselves for mental and spiritual spinsters. And this no spouse of God can afford to be.”

“Our chastity is expressed in this line, ‘I tilt my face up to his face and see how lovely I am grown for being loved.’”

“Then, who is the bride? One who is surrendered in love; one who knows herself loved; one who knows she is spoken for; one who can say, more than Ruth to Naomi: ‘Wherever you go I will go, your people shall be my people, and your God my God’ (Ruth 1:16). The bride says with more profound meaning, ‘Yes, your people shall be my people.’ We are to bear in the most universal way the hardships and miseries of the whole world. ‘Your people shall be my people,’ therefore all these hardships, all these miseries of your people, they are mine. The bride who sits under the shadow of him whom she desires has also taken his people for her people, and wherever he goes, she does follow.”

“A woman called to religious life will never succeed in being a religious unless she succeeds in being a woman.”

“Her true greatness was to let herself be martyred until old age and grey hairs.”

“Living the professed religious life is the long and unglamorous giving in which a true woman must learn to excel…in her loyal endurance, her unspectacular fidelity.”

“The nun who pursues her doggedly faithful way when prayer life has become a desert and the Lover seems to have forgotten her, when the glorious commitment of her profession is obscured by a hundred irritations, minor frustrations, and seeming futilities, when the shining goal is wrapped in a fog of weariness, is the woman who loves. She is a religious who excels in womanliness and is therefore fitted to excel in nunliness…For doggedness is not usually equated with glory, Certainly it lacks all glamor. Yet it is this kind of constancy, this unremitting fidelity which is indeed a woman’s glory.”

“To render the Spouse devotedness not on occasion but day after day and hour upon hour is to have reached down into the depths of one’s womanhood and discovered one’s greatest potential.”

“A religious is called to mother souls, to clasp all the hurts of the world to her heart. She will need to make her spiritual arms sturdy for such a task. The usefulness of labor will show itself here. For its usefulness serves the laborer as well as the labored for.”

And the final kicker that I think many women need to hear these days:

“The ‘helpless type’ female is not put forth in the Scriptures as a proper type of femininity; it is the resolute, capable, and energetic woman who is held up before our eyes, the one who can make decisions and abide by them. While this in no way implies the out-thrust jaw of the ‘do-er,’ the unfeminine personality that constantly seeks to dominate situations and persons, it does indicate strength of purpose and action…To flee from the responsibility of choice, to prefer personal stagnation to decision, to disclaim one's God-given powers of judgment in the countless situations in which personal judgment is clearly called for, is to fail quite abysmally in projecting the image of the valiant woman of Holy Scripture. It is, in fact, to fail to be a woman. And to fail in womanliness is always and simultaneously to fail in nunliness.”

[Jessica Serrano · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beginning of the book is SO good. It kind of dropped off for me at the end but overall it was still a really insightful read.

[Annamaria Bleyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part I: Meditations on Brideship allowed me to see the ways that religious sisters embrace and live out their feminine identity rather than rejecting it. Part II gets three stars because it felt kind of disjointed and choppy.

[Ugnė Gudaitytė]

„We can get such strange ideas that we serve the deprivations of the poor by tossing the gifts of our benefactors back in their faces, as it were. We do not serve the poor by not accepting the gifts which are given to us as the poor ones. While we do not ever accept what is incompatible with our lives, it is a part of serving the poor that we are the receiving ones. Only then shall we know how to give.“