Bourges, France·1880 – 1906
Sainte Élisabeth de la Trinité
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
Praise of Glory
She found the Trinity already living inside her.
“O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me to forget myself entirely that I may be established in You, as still and as peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity.”
Prayer to the Holy Trinity
Life
Born Élisabeth Catéz on 18 July 1880 in a military camp near Bourges, France, she showed an intense and willful temperament in childhood that she later spoke of with humility. From an early age she was also a gifted pianist — good enough to have pursued a conservatory career — and it was through music that she first touched the depth of beauty that would later draw her entirely toward God. Her father died when she was seven, and the family moved to Dijon, near the Carmelite convent whose bell she could hear from her window. At fourteen she made a private vow of virginity, sensing even then that she was entirely claimed.
She entered the Carmel of Dijon in 1901 at age twenty-one, taking the name Élisabeth of the Trinity. Within the convent she moved steadily inward, guided by a single luminous conviction: that the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — did not dwell somewhere remote but had taken up permanent residence within her soul. This was not theology in the abstract for her but a lived, moment-by-moment experience. She called this interior sanctuary her “heaven on earth” and returned to it constantly through what she called “recollection” — a gathering of all her faculties inward, into the presence already there. Her novice mistress and spiritual director both recognized the exceptional quality of her interior life.
In 1906, she was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a painful and fatal illness of the adrenal glands. Her final months, which she later described as a participation in Christ’s own suffering, only deepened her interior silence. She died on 9 November 1906, at twenty-six. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1984 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2016. Her writings — letters, spiritual notes, and her final retreat “Heaven in Faith” — were composed largely in the last two years of her life and reveal a mystical theology of remarkable precision and warmth.
One Heart
“I have found my heaven on earth, for heaven is God, and God is in my soul.”
Teachings
The Indwelling of the Trinity
Elizabeth’s central insight was that the Holy Trinity — not as doctrine but as living Persons — dwells within the baptized soul as in a sanctuary. “I have found my heaven on earth,” she wrote, “since heaven is God, and God is in my soul.” The spiritual life is not a search for a distant God but an ever-deeper entry into what is already present at the very center of one’s being. She spent her Carmelite years learning to live from this interior depth rather than from the surface of thought and feeling.
Praise of Glory — Laudem Gloriae
Meditating on St. Paul’s phrase “to the praise of His glory” (Ephesians 1:12), Elizabeth found her vocation: to be, in every moment, a pure act of praise. A “praise of glory” is a soul that is so transparent to God, so emptied of self-preoccupation, that God’s own love and beauty shine through it without obstruction. This was not something she reserved for prayer; she sought to be this praise while washing dishes, in conversation, in illness. The entire life becomes a single continuous act of worship.
Interior Silence and Recollection
Elizabeth taught that the great obstacle to awareness of God’s indwelling is not sin but noise — the restless chatter of a mind turned outward, endlessly engaged with the world’s surface. The practice she proposed was recollection: a gentle, repeated gathering of the attention back to the center, back to the Trinity within. “Keep silence,” she wrote, “and let God act.” This silence was not passive but intensely alive — an alert, loving receptivity to the One who is always already present.
Works & Publications
O My God, Trinity Whom I Adore (Prayer to the Holy Trinity)
Written on 21 November 1904, this prayer is one of the great mystical texts of the twentieth century — a complete expression of her theology of indwelling and her aspiration toward total union with the Trinity dwelling within her soul.
Heaven in Faith
A ten-day retreat she wrote for her sister Guite in August 1906, during her final illness. It is her fullest systematic exposition of the soul’s calling to be a “praise of glory” — luminous, warm, and composed in the shadow of approaching death.
Letters and Spiritual Writings
Over three hundred letters to family, friends, and her Carmelite community, along with personal notes and poems. Together they trace the full arc of her interior life, from her years before Carmel to her last days.
An Inspiration
Elizabeth’s core teaching — that the Divine is not elsewhere but already indwelling, already at the center of one’s own being — is among the most direct Christian expressions of what Advaita Vedanta names as the Self. The seeker need not go anywhere; the arrival is the recognition of what is already the case. Her total surrender to the Trinity within her mirrors the bhakti path of Ananta’s teaching: not effortful striving but an ever-more-complete offering of the separate self into the love that underlies it. That her life was so short, and her realization so deep, speaks to what every mystical tradition affirms: the Divine does not wait for us to be ready.