Marie Adele Garnier, Tyburn Nuns founder, on the road to sainthood.

Tuesday, October 18th, 2016

The Vatican has agreed to open the Cause for the canonisation of Mother Marie Adele Garnier, the foundress of the Tyburn Nuns.

The Tyburn Nuns have monasteries in Bombay and in Waikato.

The order, properly called the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, has spread rapidly around the world in the last few decades.

As well as the two communities in New Zealand, they have also opened convents in South America, Africa, and France.

Mother Garnier, who died in Tyburn Convent, near Marble Arch, London, in 1924, has been given the title “Servant of God” after the Congregation for the Cause of Saints concluded that there were “no obstacles” to her candidacy.

Mother Xavier McMonagle, the assistant Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns, said the nuns had sought the opening of the cause for 20 years.

“It has been a long time, but that’s not such a bad thing,” she said. “It has given us time to research her writings.”

Mother Garnier was a governess who turned down a marriage proposal to establish a religious order in Montmartre, Paris at the end of the 19th century.

The anti-clerical Law of Associations led to the nuns fleeing London in 1901.

They settled in Notting Hill two years later.

The community was dedicated to the perpetual adoration of the Holy Eucharist, but they were often attacked with obsession, possessions and objects being overturned or thrown around rooms.

Garnier witnessed the Eucharist turn to bloody flesh in a priest’s hands during Mass.

She wrote a letter to Abbé Charles Sauvé, a priest friend, describing the experience:

“At the moment in which the priest took a particle of the Holy Host and put it into the chalice I raised my eyes to adore and to contemplate the holy particle,” she wrote.

“Oh, if you could know what I saw and how I am still moved and impressed by this vision.”

“The fingers of the priest held not a white particle but a particle of striking red, the colour of blood and luminous at the same time…”

“The fingers of the priest were red on the right of the particle, as from a blood stain that seemed still wet.”

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