Elisabeth Leseur’s Transforming Witness of Crucified Love

In the spring of 2023, I was staying the weekend with my spiritual mother and father when I happened upon a book they owned, entitled The Secret Diary of Elisabeth Leseur: The Woman Whose Goodness Changed Her Husband from Atheist to Priest. I was immediately engrossed in the book, but the busyness of life at the time meant that I never finished it.  I was reminded of the book this past weekend when, during my basilica’s 40 Hours’ devotion—40 Hours of Eucharistic Adoration—I read a quote from her in The Magnificat Adoration Companion. I pulled her diary off my bookshelf and began to re-read it.

Elisabeth, like me, suffered for many years with liver problems that at times were debilitating. Unlike myself, she was married to a dogmatic atheist who spent years trying to destroy her Catholic faith. She spent many years spiritually alone, surrounded by people who did not understand her faith and who openly mocked it. She teaches all of us that on the path to holiness we must crucify our ego and offer our hidden sufferings to the Lord out of love for souls.

Elisabeth grew up in the nineteenth century in a Catholic home, thanks to her mother’s emphasis on providing a Catholic education, but her father had very little interest in the faith. Unlike some canonized saints, she did not grow up in a family of great holiness and heroic virtue. If anything, the faith was an intellectual pursuit and duty, rather than a radical call to be conformed in every way to Christ Crucified. She lived her younger years fitting in with her peers and family in the largely worldly life of Parisian bourgeois society.

It was during her 30^th year that she experienced a profound desire for holiness. Coinciding with the age Our Lord began His public ministry, Elisabeth quietly dedicated herself to renouncing everything of the world, the flesh, and the devil. She did everything she could—helped always by God’s grace—to crucify her own ego. She undertook this brutal spiritual battle for 6 years until her soul totally ruled her body. Anyone who has committed fully to the interior battle to crucify the ego knows what an intense battle it entails. The greatest spiritual war we fight is against the self.

Elisabeth’s diary begins on September 11, 1899. In the first entry she writes:

For a year I have been thinking and praying a great deal; I have tried unceasingly to enlighten myself, and in this perpetual labor my mind has matured, my convictions have become more profound, and my love of souls has increased, too. What is there greater than the human soul, or finer than conviction? We must create in ourselves a “new spirit,” the spirit of intelligence and strength; we must renew ourselves and live our interior life with intensity. We must pray and act. Every day of our life must carry us nearer to the supreme Good and Intelligence—that is, nearer to God.

These opening words are lived out in the rest of the pages of her diary. She acts on these convictions with a total reliance on the graces God poured out upon her. She sought to wage the interior battle in prayer and dying-to-self each day in order to love God above all else and in order to love and save souls. She trusted that all her prayers and sufferings would be answered by God in His appointed time. She most especially silently offered her prayers and sufferings for her beloved husband’s conversion.

Elisabeth’s witness reveals what happens to a soul who surrenders entirely to the will of the Father. She lived her days surrounded by non-believers, including the husband she adored. She spent her life battling chronic illness, injuries, and recovery from surgery. All these afflictions did not keep her from loving and receiving those the Lord sent to her. She bore these trials with serenity, joy, and “manly courage.” (The latter a term so many of the female saints use in their writings.) We are called to wage the fearsome battle for our own soul and the souls of others through prayer and sacrificial service. This requires immense fortitude.

This battle against self leads to an ever-deepening spiritual poverty that allows the Lord to transform our entire being. The constant crucifixion of our ego—as brutal as it is to experience—is the necessary death that brings about new life and holiness within us. It is only then that we can fully guide others to Christ. As Elisabeth explains:

In order to give, one must acquire; and to serve my brethren before God for one day, or for even a small part of every day, I must first be purified and strengthen my soul for many days.

Too often in our lives our understanding of holiness remains in the realm of ideas. We talk a good talk, but we do not fully commit to the arduous task of dying-to-self and engaging in the intense interior battle of purification that is required for deeper union with God and love for souls. As a writer, I see this battle at work in my own life. Elisabeth knew in the depths of her being that she had to become holy in order to help others.

If we Christians took the call to holiness seriously, then the world around us would be transformed. It means a willingness to die to our desires for power, prestige, money, pleasure, and the other things of this world that keep our egos enslaved. It is to willingly embrace daily interior crucifixion. It is to fully surrender our will to God’s will even when we don’t understand.

It is this interior crucifixion, guided through a deep prayer life, that opens us up to the miseries of others and a desire to lead them to Christ. Elisabeth’s heart expanded in order to make room for more and more souls as time went on. Her own sufferings did not harden her heart. Instead, they were the means by which the Lord taught her to love and to give herself away to others. She had a special love for those who did not know Christ. Her holy example was used by God to shine light in the darkness of those blinded to His existence and love. She offered His radiance to these souls who she loved dearly.

Elisabeth’s surrender to God in trust was a conduit through which He was able to save souls. She bore her immense pain and sufferings with serenity, peace, and joy. In her final years, as cancer claimed her earthly life, she proved a powerful witness to bearing the Cross well. Her atheist husband’s heart slowly began to turn from stone to flesh as he witnessed her boundless courage in the face of suffering. Her death revealed the beauty of a soul that belonged entirely to God.

On multiple occasions, Elisabeth told her husband Felix that upon her death he would return to the Catholic Church and become a Dominican friar. He did not know at the time, but she had offered herself as a holocaust to the Lord for this intention. She desired above all else to save her husband’s soul. Her love was so selfless and sacrificial that she asked the Lord to take her as a sacrifice for his salvation. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

Upon Elisabeth’s death, Felix became aware of her private diary where she wrote her thoughts sporadically over the years. It was these words and her constant prayers of intercession from eternity that he believes saved his soul. Her prophetic words proved to be from the Holy Spirit as Felix underwent a profound conversion and became a Dominican friar. He spent his remaining days petitioning for the beatification of his beloved wife and sharing her heroic witness with others.

At a time when many souls are lost—even within the Church—Elisabeth’s example is a powerful antidote to the egotism of our age. She points us inward to the battle of good and evil within our own hearts and how that battle must be won first if we are going to evangelize others. We must stop being people of words only and instead commit to deeper prayer and dying-to-self.

This past Sunday, the Lord commanded us to become last. Part of the problem in the Church today is that most of us are engaged in power and ego grabs. All the fights over women’s ordination, ministry heads, programs, competitions between laity, religious, and priests boil down to our own sinful egos. Too often we refuse the Cross. We don’t want to crucify our own ego in order to be set free. We want this world, not the next.

The world needs our witness, but we cannot be witnesses until we have committed fully to the Christian life. Elisabeth reveals the same truth as Our Crucified Lord. We cannot have the world and Christ. It must be Christ who fully dwells within us so that it is His light, not our own darkness, that the souls entrusted to our care see. Today is the day to begin crucifying the ego and asking the Holy Spirit for the grace to begin the war against self with fervor and without counting the cost. Souls—including our own—are on the line.

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

Élisabeth et Félix Leseur vers 1910 [photo] retrieved from WikiMedia Commons