LESEUR, ÉLISABETH

Spiritual writer; b. Paris, Oct. 16, 1866; d. Paris, May 3, 1914. She was the eldest of five children of a cultivated background, and attended a small private school. In July of 1889 she married Félix Leseur, a doctor who had lost his faith through reading the fashionable atheist literature then current in France. To unsettle his wife's moderate Catholicism, he gave her Renan's Vie de Jésus. Paradoxically, the book awakened her dormant faith, and her Spiritual Journal begins at this point.

Adopting as her motto, "Each soul that perfects itself perfects the world," she proceeded to make her life ever more ascetic, interior, and hidden. Her greatest trial arose from the fact that Félix, whom she deeply loved, did not share her spiritual adventure. Her apostolate was an indirect one: she never preached and never sought religious discussion. The hallmarks of her dealings with souls were affability, delicacy, silence, and individual encounter.

Since childhood she had suffered from hepatitis, and she was often forced to receive visitors from a chaise longue. In March of 1911, she offered her life for Félix's conversion. Soon after, her illness was diagnosed as generalized cancer and she died at the age of 48 with no apparent sign of change in Félix.

In 1917, however, her husband was reconciled to the faith and, at the age of 62 he was ordained a Dominican priest, thus fulfilling Élisabeth's prophecy that he would one day be "Père Leseur." He spoke throughout Europe and frequently referred to her Journal, which had been published in 1917. He died in February of 1950.

Her cause for beatification has been introduced in Rome.

Bibliography: m. l. herking, Elisabeth Leseur Nous Parle (Paris 1955). j. verbillion, "The Silent Apostolate of Elizabeth Leseur," Cross and Crown 11 (1959): 28–45.

[j. verbillion]