February 15 | Saint Claude de la Colombiere

Welcome, young history buffs and curious minds, to My Daily Saint, the podcast that digs deep into the incredible lives of the saints, those remarkable people who shape history and continue to inspire us today. Forget dusty old portraits and boring stories. Today, imagine that you are in a cold, dark cell. The air is damp, and every breath you take hurts your chest. Outside the walls of your prison, there is panic in the streets. Rumors are flying everywhere about a secret plot to overthrow the government.

People are scared, and when people get scared, they look for someone to blame. Right now, they are blaming you. You haven't done anything wrong. In fact, you've spent your life trying to help people. But that doesn't matter to the angry crowds outside. Friends of yours, eight of them, have already been executed because of these rumors, and in total, 35 innocent people have lost their lives. And now, you are sitting in this prison, wondering if you are next. This is the dramatic, dangerous, and incredibly fateful life of Saint-Claude de la Colombière.

Saint Claude was a French priest, born in 1641. Claude came from a big family. He was one of seven children. He was one of four siblings who decided to give their lives to the church as priests or in religious life. He was educated by the Jesuits, and he joined them when he was just 17 years old.

Now, pause right there. You might think, wow, he must have loved following all those strict rules. Actually, he hated it. The sources tell us something really surprising. Claude suffered from an intense aversion to the rigors the Jesuit order required. Aversion is a strong word. It means a strong dislike.

Imagine the thing you dislike doing the most. Maybe it's algebra homework, or running laps in P.E., or waking up early. Now, imagine choosing a life where you have to do that every single day. That was Claude. He didn't naturally love the strict lifestyle, but he possessed natural talents that were sharpened by that training. He didn't quit. He completed his training faithfully, despite how hard it was for him, and was ordained a priest in 1669. Because he stuck with it, he became a gifted preacher.

In 1674, he was sent to a town called Paray Lemoniel to be the superior of a Jesuit house. This is where the plot thickens. While he was there, he had a very important job. He was the confessor to a convent of nuns. One of those nuns was named Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Margaret Mary was claiming something pretty wild. She said she had received revelations, special messages and visions, directly from Christ. Specifically, Jesus was urging her to tell the world to have devotion to his sacred heart.

Today, you probably see pictures of the Sacred Heart everywhere, but back then, people were skeptical. Even the other nuns in her convent didn't receive her visions well. They probably thought she was making it up. But Father Claude listened. He considered her testimony carefully, and concluded that she was telling the truth. Claude used his brilliance and his writing skills to back her up, and the devotion to the Sacred Heart began to spread across the Western Catholic world.

At the same time, there was a heresy, a false teaching called Jansenism spreading around. Jansenism was a scary idea that claimed God did not want to save all people. St. Claude's writings on the Sacred Heart helped crush that idea, reminding everyone of God's love.

But Claude's life wasn't just writing and teaching in France. In 1676, he got a call to go to England. This was the danger zone. He was serving as a preacher to Mary of Medina, a Catholic duchess. The atmosphere in England was tense. And then the rumors started. A rumor of a Catholic plot against the English monarchy began to spread like wildfire. This brings us back to the dungeon. Claude was caught in the middle of this hysteria. He was thrown into prison for several weeks.

The conditions were terrible. The dampness and the cold completely ruined his health. Eventually, he was expelled from England and returned to France in 1679. He was free, but he was broken physically. He spent his final years teaching and encouraging people to love Christ's sacred heart, but his body never recovered from that English dungeon. In 1681, he returned to Paray de Monial, the place where his great mission had started. The very next year, at the age of only 41, Saint-Claude de la Colombière died from internal bleeding caused by the damage done to his health.

Saint-Claude de la Colombière is known today as the patron saint of devotion to the Sacred Heart. He didn't die by the sword, but he sacrificed his health and his life for the truth. He stood by a nun no one believed, and he stood by his faith when a whole country turned against him.

Remember how we said he had an intense aversion to the strict rules of his training, but he did it anyway? You can dislike a task and still do it faithfully. Today, pick one thing you really, really do not want to do. Maybe it's cleaning your room, finishing a difficult assignment, or being nice to someone who annoys you. Do it anyway. Thank you for joining us on My Daily Saint. We look forward to sharing another incredible story of faith and courage with you tomorrow.