Leprosy takes St. Alice out of her own convent at twenty-two

LA CAMBRE, Duchy of Brabant, 1242 AD — Saint Alice of Schaerbeek is twenty-two years old, and she has lived at the Cistercian abbey of La Cambre since she was seven. This year leprosy struck her. Because the disease is contagious, she has been taken out of the community she grew up in.

La Cambre is a house of Cistercian nuns just outside Brussels, at the entrance to the Forest of Soignes. Its Latin name is Camera Sanctae Mariae (St Mary’s Chamber). It was founded about 1200 AD, a generation before she arrived. She came from the village of Schaerbeek, on the Vilvoorde road north-east of the city, and was sent here as a child to be taught and brought up. When she was taught to read she got ahead of the other children, and then of nuns older than her. She was the best scholar among the children of the house. In the refectory she kept her eyes down; in the cloister she read instead of wandering about it. In the dormitory she made no noise that would wake anyone, and at work she was quick and never sat idle. In choir she used to cry out to God, over and over, in the words Rachel uses in the book of Genesis: “Give me children, or else I die.”

She does none of it now. She has not left the abbey’s ground: a house is being put up for her alone, and until it is finished she is lodged in another building here. A servant lives with her: the Life calls her only St. Alice’s maid, and the name that survives, in the Bollandist editor’s note, is Maerte. Her blood sister, Lady Ida, is a nun of this same house. What she has lost is the choir, the common table — and the cup.

The last of the three is a rule about the disease, not a decision of this house. In the Cistercian Order the nuns come up to the altar together for Communion. St. Alice alone is moved away from the chalice, and her biographer, an anonymous Cistercian of her own order, gives the reason in a parenthesis: “for lepers are forbidden to approach the Blood, because of the danger of the disease”.

Her biographer sets down what came of that in the years of her separation, and gives it no date. She grieved and complained, past consoling, that so great a gift had been taken from her. A voice from heaven answered her. It told her: “O most loving daughter, do not be troubled, and stop complaining that anything of me is withheld from you”; and then: “for it agrees with firm faith that whoever has tasted of my Body should rejoice that he is beyond doubt refreshed by my Blood also; because where the part is, there is the whole, and it cannot be called a part, but must be reckoned the whole.”

Her biographer names the disease in one clause and, in the next, says what it did not mean. Leprosy struck her, he writes, “not for the guilt or the punishment of any crime, but by way of a visitation, and in the manner of a bridegroom giving his bride a pledge in sign of perfect love”. He calls it “an incurable disease, desired by few”.

His account records no ceremony of separation. He gives the first night one sentence: “On the first night of her separation from the community, her contagious disease requiring it, she was afflicted with such grief of soul and bruised with so heavy a wound of heart that she was forced to give way under a shattering of the mind, for failure of spirit.” She is twenty-two, and she has been in this house fifteen years.

Then he turns from her to the women she had been taken away from, and asks how great the sadness of the whole convent must have been, “seeing itself robbed of the brightness of so great a light, and left destitute of so useful a comfort”.

She went back to prayer in tears and asked God to revive her. “For the storm was stilled, and quiet given, and peace restored to her heart,” her biographer writes. In all her trouble, he says, she flew to the breast of Christ and to his wounds the way a small child goes to its mother.

Afterwards she said that if the choice of her old health were left to her, she would certainly refuse it. She would rather stay as she is and be visited by God alone than rule the whole world.