Vision
In 1792, Coudrin was secretly ordained to the presbyterate just as France was becoming embroiled in revolution against its monarchy. Coudrin went into hiding in an attic of the granary of the Chateau d'Usseau where he was confined for six months. During his hiding, Coudrin woke up one evening surrounded by illuminated apparitions of priests, brothers and nuns in white albs. He took the vision to be a divine calling to establish a religious institute that would become the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Coudrin quickly left the granary and traveled to Poitiers to begin an underground ministry, waiting for the right moment to start his group.
During his underground ministry in 1794, Coudrin met Henriette Aymer de Chevalerie. She had been released from a revolutionary prison, accused of hiding a priest. She told Coudrin of a heaven-sent vision she had while in prison calling her to service to God. Coudrin and Henriette Aymer de Chevalerie shared with each other their visions of creating a religious institute in the midst of danger for Roman Catholics in France.
Read more about this topic: Peter Coudrin
Famous quotes containing the word vision:
“For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces—a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“I have a Vision of the Future, chum.
The workers’ flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score.”
—Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984)