Description

Oil Dedicated to St Marguerite Bays Mystic

St Marguerite Bays Mystic born on September 8 1815 at Pierra, in the Fribourg countryside, in Switzerland. The 2nd of 7 children in a modest family of farmers . As from early childhood, she helped her parents in household and gardening chores. Quite lively and playful, nevertheless she already had a propensity for prayer in solitude and silence.

Her contemporaries thought that she would enter a convent but that was not to be the case: she was to live from her livelihood as a seamstress whilst embracing a life of celibacy chosen in chastity.

Her spinning wheel sang early in the morning then Marguerite participated with fervour at daily mass in the church at Siviriez. In the families that she then visite. She had the opportunity to meet and understand housewives often anxious. Weighed down by difficulties. She helped them with so much goodness, patience and prayer.

Further, she was often asked by these mothers to watch over their sick and dying. She knew very well how to prepare for their meeting with Our Lord.

Remaining in the paternal domicile, she made sure to participate well in the household tasks which fell to her. Her sister-in-law Josette did not make her life easy : a severe and rude woman, she humiliated Marguerite and did not spare her. Marguerite did not hold grudges against her.

And, when Josette arrived at the end of her life, struck down precociously by an illness, Marguerite took care of her and prepared her for death. She was in fact the only person she accepted near her.

Her sister Marie-Marguerite, called « Mariette », suffered from the dissolution of her marriage, and came back to live at home. Her brother Joseph, who remained a bachelor, with a rather violent character and sometimes loose morals, ended up serving a short prison sentence!

And her elder brother Claude had a child outside wedlock, the little François. Marguerite asked him to recognise the child officially. She took charge of his education. On the other hand her brother Jean understood better the mystical life of his sister and sometimes worried about her health.