How Catherine and Eddie Doherty Sacrificed Their Conjugal Intimacy for the Kingdom of God
by Dawn Eden Goldstein
An excerpt from the book, The Sacred Heart: A Love for All Times, by Dawn Eden Goldstein
The decisive moment...came in late October 1951, in a café in Paris. Catherine and Eddie had gone to Rome together—he to research a book, she to attend a conference of leaders of lay apostolates. Since she needed to stay longer in the city than he did, they had agreed to reunite in Paris after the congress.
In a conversation that neither of them would ever forget, Catherine told Eddie that she had been called to meet with the pope’s secretary of state, Monsignor Giovanni Montini (the future Pope Paul VI), and then with Pope Pius XII himself. Both were familiar with her apostolate, and both encouraged her to take it to a new level by making it a secular institute—a new form of religious life by which laymen and women could make and observe vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience while remaining laity. They would not have to wear religious habits, and they could continue their work in the world, sanctifying it from within.
Catherine’s eyes and face were aglow as she spoke of having her life’s work, her mission, affirmed by Pius XII. “The man is a living saint,” she said, “a white flame of sanctity.” But Eddie’s thoughts lingered on the words “vows of…chastity.” He realized what it would mean, for Catherine—for their marriage. And somehow, as shocking as it was, it was a cross that he felt was being offered to him from the hands of the Lord.
“My mind detoured back to Rome as Catherine talked,” he later wrote, “back to early Rome, back to the days of the first Christians who died for Christ…Catherine and I had been given a choice the early Christians never had. We could give up more than our lives. We could give not only ourselves; we could also give each other!”
When his eyes again met Catherine’s, he knew she was thinking the same thing.
Each of us,” Eddie wrote, “at the same time, had fallen on the sword of the holy will of God, and was stabbed with an unearthly joy!”
“By the end of the conversation, he added, “There was not the slightest feeling of separation in either of us. Rather we felt closer together than we had when we sat down to eat and drink and talk. The swords had pinned us together, heart to heart, soul to soul, forever. How can a man explain such a thing?”
What was happening, Eddie realized, was “something like what happened in the Crucifixion on Calvary. A soldier opened the dead Christ’s heart with a lance, and it became a place of refuge for all the oppressed and hungry and desperate and despairing hearts in the world.”
His and Catherine’s hearts would be joined even more deeply not only with each other, but with all the Mystical Body, all who are united in and through the Heart of Jesus. Catherine and Eddie continued to grow together with Jesus in a union of hearts, even as they lived in separate buildings within the Madonna House property.
In time, Eddie would become Father Eddie, ordained in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, which is in communion with Rome and permits married men to be ordained to the priesthood.
Shortly before his death in 1975, Eddie completed his memoir. It ends with a meditation on lyrics from the song “The Impossible Dream:” “to love pure and chaste from afar…to reach the unreachable star.”
Eddie came to feel that, in learning to love Catherine purely and chastely from afar, he truly had reached the unreachable star. Through his sacrificial love for his wife, he had learned to love as Jesus loves.
.--Dawn Eden Goldstein
(in The Sacred Heart: A Love for All Times)
