Introduction by
Jacques Gauthier
This is the story of Georgette Faniel, born in Montreal on the 8th of July 1915 and who died on the 2nd of July 2002 at the age of 86. Still very young, God called her to follow Him. She allowed Him to transform her into His love. He spoke to her heart and she answered Him very simply, thinking that it was the same for everyone. All she wanted was to love, and it was in loving that she endured suffering at the age of 6, wanting to share the sufferings of Jesus.
Her family and friends affectionately calle her “Mimi”, and I will do the same throughout this book. I never met her except internally by reading her spiritual notes and letters. I discovered a warm and well-balanced woman, sensitive and true, simple and profound, very humble with a lot of humor, totally human because totally in God. This book approaches her story like one approaches sacred ground that we gradually discover by rubbing shoulders with her.
A small flame
Suzanne Dignard, her spiritual daughter, describes her thus: “Mimi is a small flame within the Church. No long discourses, but a lot of love”. Let us not look for anything else: a lively flame of love, according to a Carmelite poet, John of the Cross, with the dancing holiness of a Theresa of Lisieux, a melodious humility of the Poverello of Assisi. Each baptized person also receives this love of God through the Holy Spirit, but with Mimi, it is abundant, effusive, to the point where she does not speak to God, she chats with Him.
This ordinary woman lived in a modest apartment on Bordeaux Street in Montreal. She stayed there sixty-six years, living in the world but not of the world. Often bedridden, she rarely went out, under the spiritual guidance of fervent priests sent to her at the right time to sustain her in her total gift to the love of the Father. Buried like leaven in dough, she carried the world in her constant prayer, without drawing attention, without making any noise.
She wished that her life remain hidden with Christ for the glory of the Father. She never refused Him, to the point of being configured to the Son, priest and victim, her spouse. In childbirth during the night of Gethsemani, she offered herself through him, with him and in him for the salvation of souls, her brothers and sisters in humanity. The sufferings on the cross dug furrows in her flesh so that shoots might grow in eternal life. Only God knows how great was the harvest.
A recluse in her apartment, she has stepped aside to give God first place, receiving His secrets in the interior silence of the Presence. This did not prevent her from serving the poor by mending their clothes. She received people from different walks of life who would leave her with peace in their hearts. A woman of compassion, she understood in her soul what her visitors were going through. A fire consumed her, the one Jesus had come on earth to light: a light enlightened her, one that Jesus wanted to see to the glory of the Father: “Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.” (Mt 5, 16)
Mimi is the Father’s marvel, set as a jewel that glowed only to please Him. Her sufferings accepted out of love are not found on the menu of spiritualities à la carte. Everything seems so miraculous in her eucharistic and marian life, somewhat like Marthe Robin whom she admired: locutions from Jesus and the Father, invisible stigmatas, conversations with Mary, interior visions, the offering of her life for the recognition of the apparitions in Medugorje, clashes with the Devil, a sign of the alliance on her body, and more, that you will discover along these pages. Must we remind ourselves that apparitions and private revelations recognized by the Church do not belong to the deposit of faith? Their function “is not to improve or complete the definitive Revelation of Chist, but to help us live it more fully at a certain time in history.” 1
I admit that it can disorientate modern day readers. However, what escapes our reasoning, science, is also part of reality, like love, poetry, mysticism. Persons with more rational minds risk being profoundly taken aback when faced with such testimonies of faith while others will more easily accept that God’s ways are not our own, that He is free with his gifts and that nothing is impossible to Him when He reveals himself to the humble: “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.” (Mt 11,25)
These childlike are often great lovers of God. Through their weaknesses explodes divine might, shown by Saint Paul: “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.” (1 Co 1, 27-29)
Mimi did not look for sensationalism. Each day, she sacrificed her will, like Abraham his son Isaac, to better offer herself to the Father’s love and console his heart for not being loved by his children. Her only wish was to do his will, believe in his action within her. On the 8th of December 1985, during her night of the faith, she takes the vow “to believe in all that God is doing in me, that I don’t understand, but that I accept totally! In love!” Everything in her life, especially suffering, can be summarized in this act of faith, in the love that hopes all things and endures all things.” (1 Cor 13, 7) Her last words to her spiritual director expresses well the mystery of her offered life: “Yes, you led me to the cross and I thank you!” Everything was consummate.
The one who signed many of her letters, “the little servant of God in the service of the Church and of souls”, is far from the paranormal phenomena with a Hollywood flavor or an esoteric discourse a la mode. She was consumed by love on a daily basis to bring divine life to souls. An authentic daughter of the Church, she prayed and suffered for its members, especially priests. Cardinal Paul Emile Léger will authorize her spiritual director to celebrate mass in her apartment in 1960 and Cardinal Paul Grégoire will ask her to come to his bedside at Notre-Dame Hospital in 1994.
All that Mimi received from Jesus, she gave to the Father, becoming a Trinitarian labor of love, a mistress of spiritual life. Her entire life was a Good Friday enlightened by Easter, a night that the Risen One sprinkled with stars. Her breath returned to its Source that murmured in her soul, the firm voice of the Father, burning with the flame of the Holy Spirit.
A tresor to be discovered
Who could have known that such a treasure was hidden on the island of Montreal? Isn’t it time to unveil it, to share the richness of its contents? This is the aim of this spiritual biography: to show to the world the hidden life of Mimi, to reveal large excerpts of her spiritual notes. “For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible; nothing is secret except to come to light.” (Mk 4, 22)
Why such a book at this time, you might ask? I could answer you the way Mimi would: “Because it is the hour of the Eternal Father”. One day, He told her: “Like my Son, you will have a public life”. She did not understand these words nor how it would be realized in her life time. There had been two reports that revealed her mystic life, but it had been mixed in with other testimonies. The disclosure of these secrets had caused her a lot of pain.
The first report was in obedience to her spiritual director, Armand Girard and to her spiritual counsellor, Guy Girard. These twin brothers, priests of the Society of the Missionaries of the Holy Apostles, will accompany Mimi from 1983 to her death in 2002. She answered their questions and her close relationship with Medjugorje in the book “Marie, Reine de la paix, demeure avec nous” (Mary, Queen of peace, stay with us)2. What she kept secret for thirty years was suddenly revealed.
The other report is found in the work Enquête sur l’existence des anges gardiens (Inquiry on the existence of guardian angels)3 The journalist Pierre Jovanovic dedicates a whole chapter on her with the stigmatized like Anne-Catherine Emerich, Theresa Neumann, Padre Pio. With the permission of Father Guy Girard, he bombards her with questions in her room concerning her relationship with the Trinity and the angels, her sufferings of atonement and mystical graces. He remarks her voice of a little girl and her childlike eyes, her fatigue and her humor. He notices her allergy to the word “mystic”, surely out of humility, for she saw herself as an ordinary woman like Mary. “I am a simple servant of God”, she told Jovanovic. And he comments: “As a journalist, I had interviewed too many persons not to discover the sincerity and especially the authenticity of this woman. Her answers were clearer than those from any doctor in theology”.
My wife, at this time, had passed me this book. It was the first time that I heard about Georgette Faniel. I was surprised that such a “mystic” could be living a few hours from my place. Not being fond of private revelations and supernatural phenomena, I continued to teach theology at the University of Saint-Paul in Ottawa without thinking of Mimi. It is only twenty years later that she comes back into my life.
In January 2013, the Girard Fathers unknown to me sent me their manuscript entitled Alliance to know what I thought of it. In part one, they evoke Mimi’s itinerary during forty themes, short impressionistic tableaux on the extraordinary events of her life. Part two is made up of an exchange of letters between her and the Franciscan Croatian poet Janko Bubalo, close to Medjugorje. I told them of my amazement of such a soul and indicated that this book needed a general introduction. They asked me to write one. So I did during the Easter Triduum of 2013. There was a connection, the fire spread, and Alliance was published with an introduction in 2014 by ‘éditions Sakramento’.
Who could have guessed that my path would have crossed Mimi’s this way? The Girard Fathers told me that it was in the heart of God. Thus began between us a solid friendship, nourished by fruitful exchanges concerning Mimi. Ever more aware of their limitations at the age of 80, they turned over to me the writings of their spiritual mother in May 2016. This was totally unexpected. I accepted them without too much reflexion because I love Christ and consider Mimi as someone who greatly loved the Lord and in whom the power of the resurrection could be seen.
I found myself with five boxes of documents containing close to eight thousand pages: Mimi’s spiritual notes and letters, writings of her family, letters of her spiritual directors, notes and reflections of Suzanne Dignard, thematic tableaux and other texts. The reading was taxing at times, even disconcerting. Yet, can we leave the lamp under the bushel basket, Jesus asks? “It is set on the lampstand where it gives light to all in the house” (Mt 5, 15).
Mimi would often say that we must wait for the moment that God has chosen. This biography, written in prayer, is therefore on time. Everything I have written is based on texts and testimonies of those close to Mimi. I have invented nothing.
This book was given to me like the others. Take it for what it is, a gift from the Father.
Source: Georgette Faniel, le don total. Biographie spirituelle. Montréal, Novalis, 2018, pp. 11-17.
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1 Catéchisme de l’Église catholique, 1993, no 67
2 Guy Girard, Armand Girard, Marie, Reine de la paix, demeure avec nous, Éditions Paulines, 1987, p. 55-105.
3 Pierre Jovanovic, Enquête sur l’existence des anges gardiens, Éditions de la Seine, 1993, p. 249-263).
