From Carmel to Rome
“THE LORD LED ME TO ROME, THAT HE APPOINTED ME TO AID IN HIS PLANS”
The vision of the two mountains echoed in Mother Frances' heart as a clear indication from the Lord. Considering also her health, which was increasingly frail, she discerned God's will not without difficulty: 'I came to understand,' she wrote, 'that it was God's will for me to leave that monastery'. Thus, although she had been admitted to religious profession, on December 8, 1882, she wrote an official letter to the prioress in which she expressed her intention to leave the monastery.
Five days later, she crossed the threshold of Himmelspforten in secular dress--a painful but necessary cut to meekly comply with 'the divine designs’.
She was taken to Würzburg railway station by her brother, and she travelled to Bamberg, where the family had long since moved following the retirement of her father, the lawyer Adam Streitel. There, in her father's house, among family members dismayed by her decision, Mother Frances experienced the weight of humiliation and embarrassment at the situation she was experiencing, which inevitably involved the whole family.
THE DESIGNS OF GOD RUN FAST
ON THE RAILS OF OBEDIENCE,
STORED IN THE SUITCASE OF THE HEART
THAT LETS ITSELF BE GUIDED
"in unexpected and unusual ways"
“Having been led by grace since my seventeenth year,
although I often resisted this loving guidance with force and ill-will,
still I can say that in matters of importance and of rare occurrence,
I allowed myself to be guided solely by obedience.
And in the future holy obedience shall also be my guide
on the ways of the Lord”
Mother Frances Streitel
"I LET MYSELF BE GUIDED ONLY BY OBEDIENCE"
At this juncture, every day, St. Galdolf's church would become the silent place of her consolation, and adoration before the Tabernacle, the only desirable comfort. With one hope in her heart to understand well and soon what she would have to do to fulfil "the divine designs".
Meanwhile Fr. Cyprian, her confessor at Carmel, had contacted Fr. Jordan, a German priest who had founded the Catholic Teaching Society in Rome, a community of religious and lay people committed to defending and reawakening the faith through the proclamation of the Gospel and the testimony of life. Father Cyprian proposed collaboration with Mother Frances to this man of God, who also had in his heart the project of founding a women's branch with the same aims, "because," he thought, "they were in agreement in ideas".
The contact with Fr. Jordan would mark a new stage in those "unexpected and unusual" ways of God that Mother Frances would always tread with courage and passion, never tiring of keeping her eyes fixed on the only possible desire: "to please God".