FAR away from home in distant Czestochowa, Emily felt the pangs of homesickness for the first time. She missed her loving parents, her devoted brother and sister, and the city where she had known so much joy. She tried to understand, however, the wisdom of her parents’ choice and the good that would accrue to her by the advantages given her; but her sensitive nature was made to suffer much in the transplanting from a home, where she was the only child and where every attention was given to her, to a convent boarding school where of necessity life takes on a more formal aspect.
One quality helped her to bridge the gap between the lavish love bestowed upon her in her family home and the seeming absence of it when she took her place among the regimented school girls. In her childhood she ever sought the company of others and very readily made friends with young and old alike. At one time when she was hardly four and Honorata was being courted, she told her that she, too, would be very much pleased with the repeated visits of a young sensible man. She liked people all her life, making it often seem that obedience to the second of the greatest commandments was a natural gift of hers. In fact, many marveled later at the way she was able to combine her love of solitude and her love of people. She loved God more not because she loved his creatures less.
It was not difficult, then, for her to find among the scores and scores of girls of her age and same social status who attended the school, a number with whom she could share her childish fears and innocent joys. Within a short time she made many friends and with their company the nostalgic feelings soon yielded to the beginning of a wholesome and healthy school life.
Her studies, too, soon absorbed most of her time for Emily was a diligent student. Her later life showed a thorough formal training in her early youth. Her handwriting remained ever artistically beautiful, her spoken language was not only grammatically flawless but poetical as well, her experience with the study of nature was surprising, her appreciation of music betrayed a theoretical knowledge, and her acquaintance with the works of literature gained for her recognition from many.
As each school term drew to a close Emily looked forward to the time when her father would call at the school and take her back to Warsaw to the home she loved. She looked forward also to the few weeks in the country which she spent there annually with friends of the family. Her parents always arranged for the stay knowing that the country air was beneficial to their frail daughter. She appreciated the opportunity that afforded her a communication with the nature that she so loved, and availed herself of it well. She later recalled the frequent jaunts which she then made to the woods where she gathered flowers and listened to the song of the nightingale, or simply waded in the cool water of the spring that flowed near by. After a rain she went with the family on a mushroom picking excursion always returning with a new knowledge of the edible forms of these fungi which she put to good use many times later. When the woods were ready to yield the berries peculiar to that locality, she hastened with her little basket to gather some to eat with milk or cream at the evening meal. The sight of the berry pickers on their way home from the Pennsylvania woods later brought back memories of these happy times of her childhood on the farm. But best of all, she enjoyed the evening spent in the out-of-doors on these vacations around a fire made of resinous wood where she listened to the roaring tales and famous legends familiarly recounted or joined in with the group and sang the simple folk-songs.
She grew to love the Sisters of the Congregation of Mary with their habits of blue who had charge of the school which she attended. They were canonically approved by Pope Benedict XIV in 1752 as the Congregation of Maria Vitae. In addition to the primary aim of individual sanctification, the Sisters engaged in teaching girls and the catechetical training of neophytes. According to a study made by the Reverend V. Paszkiewicz, there were 17 convents of the Congregation in 1820 in Lithuania and White Russia with 90 Sisters and 465 girls and 13 neophytes under their care. Since the founding of the Community they had helped to bring the true faith 2000 from Judaism; of these 32 had entered the Community. The convent in Czestochowa where Emily made their acquaintance was founded about 1826. The church dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was consecrated by Bishop Warszewski, September 7, 1862.
More important, however, Emily grew to love the Blessed Mother, her heavenly Mother, more and more. For here in Czestochowa, the city of the frequent refuge, was her most famous and most cherished shrine. Her school was on the right side of the main avenue leading up the slope to the summit of Clairmont where the sacred edifice was constructed. It seemed an augury of the divine gifts that would later be granted to Emily that she was brought to spend the most impressionable years of her life in the holiest nucleus of Poland, at Czestochowa, where in a monastery fortress on Clairmont overlooking the town, the nation’s greatest treasure of ecclesiastical wealth was enshrined. It was the picture of the Madonna and Child, copies of which are seen everywhere in that Catholic country, in mansions, under peasant thatches, in taverns, and at cross-road shrines.
Czestochowa was the Polish Lourdes, dear to the heart of every native. Ever since the year 1382 when Ladislaus the Duke of Opole, founded the monastery and placed there the miraculous image of the Lady, painted according to legend by St. Luke the Evangelist, thousands of pilgrims came to the city yearly. They were pilgrims in the real sense of the word, coming there out of genuinely spiritual motives.
Emily watched the constant flow of her pious people, who came to make a public profession of their love for the Queen of their land. She was present many times at the ceremonies in the chapel, where she gazed long at the venerated image covered with pearls, diamonds, and precious stones, all votive offerings of the faithful. She witnessed the exhibitions of the faith of those present and entered with them in their prayers of thanksgiving, of atonement for sin, or of intense pleas for help from their Heavenly Mother. The loving devotion of these pilgrims for the Mother of God always impressed her deeply.
The Pauline Fathers, i.e., the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God from the shrine, served the spiritual needs of the Sisters of the Congregation of Mary. It seems that no permanent chaplain was assigned, however, for Mother Veronica amusingly stated that she used to like the duty of portress which was entrusted to the older girls, for then she could boast in her childish way before her companions that she knew first which Father had come to say Mass.
The day of her first Holy Communion was the most important day of her childhood which Emily spent away from home. For that day her whole family had come to be with their darling and to add to her joy on the occasion of the significant event. She must have made a pretty picture as she approached the Eucharistic table. She was small for her twelve years and was clothed in lily-white, her blonde curls covered by a lacy veil caught with a delicate sprat of myrtle. Her blue eyes and fair face lit up with an innocent smile as she received her Lord and her God for the first time, reflecting the beauty of her guileless soul carefully prepared for the solemn act. Then she was alone with her God.
She remembered for a long time her father’s tear-stained face on that day and in mentioning her First Holy Communion day, she recalled this, too, adding, that it was difficult for her to understand at the time that her father’s tears were caused by pious joy.
She was her father’s little queen and he entered into her every event with a whole-hearted affection. He did not live, however, to experience an equally great event, her entrance into the convent and her reception of the holy habit. Emily had a special love for her father, too, for though she seldom made reference to the members of her family, she did mention that she had a partiality for him.
After the first important day she desired to receive Holy Communion often, and though it is known that daily Communion was not common a century ago, she practiced, in her words, frequent reception of the sacrament. How miraculously effective each reception of the Divine Power is as an incentive to serve God with renewed, indescribable fervor! It was the thought of her Holy Communion that she was anxious to receive each time it was permissible by the custom of the time that made her double and redouble her efforts to conform to the divine ideal, and helped her remain in a constant state of innocence in the years that followed.
It was during her stay at school with the Sisters of the Congregation of Mary that Emily first experienced the unmistakable signs of a religious vocation. The whole atmosphere here was conducive to the strengthening of an attraction to the religious life which she had earlier manifested; the example of the Sisters, the nearness to the Virgin’s shrine where she spent long and happy hours, the curriculum of the school with religion always taught by a well-trained priest catechist. But God’s grace was present; she longed for Christ to posse4ss her soul entirely and she cooperated fully with this grace. There were many girls at the school at the time and it is not now known if any followed her example in choosing her form of life.
She gradually became more serious, and though her gaiety was with her still, her absence from the more festive gatherings of her companions became more and more frequent. The transiency of worldly things impressed her more and more, her longing for closer contact with the spiritual grew, her desire for a life of self-immolation increased, and long before her school days were over she had already made her decision. Nothing less than complete union with her Divine Spouse, attained by leading a life of austere perfection in a convent, would satisfy her.
When Emily made the announcement to her family that she had chosen the life of the Sisters of the Congregation of Mary, they were not surprised. Her tastes and attitudes had long revealed to them the precious graces granted to her by God. Neither were they opposed to her wishes. Though her mother was again widowed, and would feel the separation from her daughter keenly, she gave Emily her wholehearted and sincere blessing. She would not hinder the workings of divine grace or be the cause of disrupting the tranquility of her daughter’s soul. More – she rejoiced in thought that her youngest had been chosen for a union so holy and so intimate, and that an eternity of happiness as a Spouse of Christ was to be ensured her.
Emily found ready acceptance in the community, too. The Sisters had long known her and esteemed her for her piety, her refinement of manners, her diligence in studies, and docility in accepting rules and regulations. They honored her for her reliability and sweetness of disposition and most of all for the charity which had impressed its beautiful seal on her soul. She soon proved her aptness in the newly-adopted life and after her short period of postulancy was over she was ready to receive the habit of the order.
Her reception day as a Sister of the Congregation of Mary was a great occasion in her short life to show her gratitude to Almighty God for the graces which until then He had bestowed on her. She could enumerate many: devoted parents, a loving home, freedom from material want, a careful and religious training, fairly-good health, an agreeable disposition and greatest of all, a vocation to serve Him all the days of her life. She promised on that day that she would never leave Him, and would forever remain His faithful and loving Spouse.
All the Sisters in the home shared Sister Veronica’s newly-found joy. The addition of the young novice to the community was likewise gratefully accepted by them from Divine Providence and their Holy Mother. She was young and promising, pliable material for the workings of grace, and in their sincere desires for the progress of their community a signal of hope for its bright future. They did not have at the time the faintest premonition that their fond hopes would never be materially realized. For before her novitiate days were over, the Congregation was visited by the greatest cross in its existence and Sister Veronica had in it her share.
It came in the form of suppression by governmental decree and consequent dispersion of the members of the Congregation. The blow came as a bolt of lightning from a thunder-filled sky and left in its wake an unmeasurable amount of suffering, for some ceasing only at the grave. Mother Veronica never forgot the day the Russian soldiers appeared within the convent walls. The decree was read – it was understood that the uprising of 1863, the third of the unsuccessful national insurrections, had failed, and from now on the Russian victors were beginning their systematic and ruthless elimination of everything that would be instrumental in fanning opposition to the czarist rule or breeding new insurgents against the existing order. The Catholic religion was the strongest force in this category, so the first aim of governmental attack was directed here. Religious schools and convents would therefore not be tolerated and the institution of Czestochowa was listed among these. The novices and postulants of this house would be returned to their parental homes; the professed, ten in number, would be transferred to a cloister and allowed to round out the years of their earthly existence here. The members of a cloister were considered harmless, having no contact with the outside world, and since they would not be allowed to admit new members, they would naturally in time cease to exist as a religious community. Immediately after the declaration of the Russian officers, their brutal looting and desecration of the newly constructed convent and church began.
Within a half hour after the reading of the governmental order, Emily was on her way home. What went on in the young novice’s mind at the time, what anguish filled her heart then, would be difficult to express. Her dreams for a convent-life were shattered; her hopes for consecration to God by a religious profession were gone; her desires for a life of intimate union with her Spouse seemed in vain. But more important, the sight of sin in all its ugliness wounded her sensitive soul.
It was ever thus with Mother Veronica. When made the subject of an attack that would scar the most callous feeling, words in her own defense would be absent, but her utterance, “But God is offended,” never failed. In retelling the story of the dispersion, Mother Veronica always said that when she went out into the street after leaving the building, she dared not raise her eyes, - so embarrassed was she before heaven for the perfidious deeds of man against his God.
Meanwhile her Sisters were being transferred to the Dominican convent at Piotrkow. September 1, 1869, they were transferred again with the Dominican Sisters to the village of St. Anne near Przyrow. Their superior, Mother Pauline Jellec, was first to die April 30, 1876. Three were suffocated in a fire which raged in the old convent in January, 1881. The last of the group, Sister Eugenia Matwillo, died in 1914. With her death, the Congregation ceased to exist.
October 10, 1865 on the demand of the government the bishop handed over the property of the Sisters of Mary to be used as a Russian High School and the church as an assembly hall for the youth. Following the restoration of Poland’s independence after World War I, the church became diocesan property as parish church of St. James.
