Dina Bélanger

Despite a promising musical career, Dina had felt a pressing call to the consecrated life since childhood. On August 11, 1921, at the age of 24, she entered the novitiate of the Religious of Jesus and Mary in Sillery. She received the habit on February 15, 1922, under the name Sister Marie Sainte-Cécile-de-Rome and pronounced her first vows on August 15, 1923. After her profession, she was sent to the convent of Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse to teach music. However, after only five weeks of teaching, she contracted scarlet fever while caring for a sick student. This illness, occurring in an already fragile constitution, rapidly degenerated into pulmonary tuberculosis. Forced to return to Sillery, she had to limit her teaching activities, which she continued only intermittently. It was in this context of illness and seclusion that her superior, having discerned the exceptional depth of her interior life, ordered her in March 1924 to write the account of her life and spiritual experiences. Dina obeyed out of pure submission, writing in pencil in several notebooks what would become her spiritual autobiography, published posthumously under the title A Life in Christ. She pronounced her perpetual vows on August 15, 1928, in the convent infirmary.

The life of Dina Bélanger is marked by a mystical union of unheard-of depth with Christ. Through her writings, she describes how Jesus gradually substitutes Himself for her, to the point that she can write: "We are no longer two, Jesus and I, we are one, Jesus alone." She receives exceptional mystical graces, notably the permission to pronounce the "most perfect vow" of total abandonment on October 3, 1924, and the invisible stigmata of the Passion on January 22, 1927. Her physical suffering, caused by tuberculosis, becomes for her a means of offering and communion with the Passion of Christ for the salvation of souls. She accepts the illness with deep serenity and joy, considering herself a "little beggar of love." She enters the infirmary permanently in April 1929 and dies there on September 4, 1929, at the age of 32.

After her death, Dina Bélanger's reputation for holiness spread rapidly, notably thanks to the publication and wide distribution of her autobiography by her congregation. The diocesan process for her beatification opened in Quebec in 1939. The miracle accepted for her beatification was the scientifically inexplicable healing of a nine-month-old infant, André-Jude Chiasson, which occurred on September 4, 1939 (the day of the tenth anniversary of Dina's death). Born in the parish of Lamèque, in New Brunswick, the child was suffering from incurable hydrocephalus. Following a novena of prayers addressed to Dina Bélanger by his family, the child's cranium closed and his symptoms disappeared completely, a healing noted as instantaneous and lasting. Dina Bélanger was solemnly proclaimed Blessed on March 20, 1993, by Pope John Paul II in Saint Peter's Square in Rome.

The spirituality of Dina Bélanger is centered on love, absolute trust, and abandonment to the divine will, summarized by her motto: "To love and let Jesus and Mary act." Her devotion is profoundly Eucharistic and Marian, nourished by the writings of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort. She considered her music as a prelude to and an expression of her divine praise. Nicknamed "the Little Flower of Canada," she leaves a major spiritual legacy through her autobiography, translated into several languages and read throughout the world. Several institutions today bear her name, notably the Collège Dina-Bélanger in Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse. Her tomb, located in the chapel of the provincial house of the Religious of Jesus and Mary in Sillery (Quebec), remains a frequented place of pilgrimage.