Blessed Dina Bélanger

Who was Blessed Dina Bélanger?

Blessed Dina Bélanger was a Quebec pianist who gave up a concert career to become a religious sister, and who left behind one of the great mystical autobiographies of the twentieth century. She was born in Quebec City on April 30, 1897, entered the Religious of Jesus and Mary in 1921, and died of tuberculosis at their convent in Sillery on September 4, 1929, at thirty-two. Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1993. We keep her feast on September 4.

She was practically an only child; her little brother died at about three months old. Her family was comfortable and known for its charity, and she grew up in the Saint-Roch district of the city. When a teacher told the little girl that there was no St. Dina, the Dina Bélanger Center recounts, she resolved that she would become a saint herself and give a patron to every girl who bore her name.

A musician in New York

Dina began piano at eight, and the parish organist of Notre-Dame-de-Jacques-Cartier took her under his wing. She earned a teaching diploma in 1914. From 1916 to 1918, in the middle of the First World War, she studied piano, harmony and composition at the Institute of Musical Art in New York, the school that later became the Juilliard School. The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints notes that her marks were "excellent." She lived at a residence run by the Religious of Jesus and Mary, the congregation that would become her family.

Back in Quebec from 1918 to 1921, she played in benefit concerts for war widows and orphans and kept praying over her vocation. She later wrote that Jesus said to her, "Je te veux à Jésus-Marie," "I want you at Jesus-Mary."

Sister Marie Sainte-Cécile de Rome

On August 11, 1921, Dina entered the novitiate of the Religious of Jesus and Mary at Sillery, on the heights above the St. Lawrence. The congregation had been founded in Lyon in 1818 by St. Claudine Thévenet. She received the habit on February 15, 1922, with the name Marie Sainte-Cécile de Rome, after St. Cecilia, the patron of musicians. She made her first vows on August 15, 1923, and her perpetual vows on August 15, 1928. She taught music, including at the convent of Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse.

Her motto, quoted by Pope John Paul II, was "Jésus et Marie, la règle de mon amour, et mon amour la règle de ma vie": Jesus and Mary, the rule of my love, and my love the rule of my life. As a novice she wrote, "Ma faim de la communion croissait toujours," my hunger for Communion kept growing. Her one desire was that Jesus alone would live in her.

The autobiography

In March 1924 her superior asked her to write the story of her soul. She obeyed, though she said that writing her life cost her more than anything else she ever did. She kept writing in notebooks, day after day, until her death. The book was published in 1934 as Une vie dans le Christ, and in English as The Autobiography of Dina Bélanger; she herself called it "Mon chant d'amour," my song of love. It is full of dialogues with Jesus, and it is often compared with the Story of a Soul of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who died the year Dina was born.

She caught tuberculosis while nursing a student, and by twenty-nine she was confined to the infirmary. Before she died she wrote: "Au ciel, je serai une petite mendiante d'amour: la voilà, ma mission ! et je la commence immédiatement." In heaven I will be a little beggar of love: that is my mission, and I am beginning it at once. Her final motto, the Pope said, was "Aimer et laisser faire Jésus et Marie," to love, and to let Jesus and Mary act.

Miracle and beatification

• Approved: in 1939, at Lamèque in New Brunswick, a baby with hydrocephalus had been given up by the doctors. The family made a novena to Dina, and the child recovered completely. The healing was judged miraculous and was the miracle approved for her beatification.

The diocesan process for her cause opened in Quebec in 1939. Pope John Paul II beatified her in Rome on March 20, 1993, the day before he canonized her foundress, St. Claudine Thévenet, and St. Teresa of the Andes. He called her a "fervent soul" and said her gifts as a musician had prepared her to welcome the divine presence.

Symbols of Blessed Dina Bélanger in art

Dina lived in the age of photography, and most images of her are photographs or portraits made from them. She is shown in the black habit of the Religious of Jesus and Mary, with the white band around her face. Common attributes:

• Music or a piano: her gift, and her religious name taken from St. Cecilia.
• The Eucharist: her "hunger for Communion."
• The Heart of Jesus: the center of her prayer and her writing.

Feast day, tomb and prayer

We keep her feast on September 4. Her tomb is visited at the Dina Bélanger Center, in the Jesus and Mary residence at 2049 chemin Saint-Louis in Sillery, Quebec City, which also has a museum and an exhibition on her life. Each year the Center leads an online novena from August 26 to September 3. See also the feast day calendar.

The Center publishes this prayer for graces through her intercession, with ecclesiastical approval:

Père très bon, tu as mis dans le coeur de la Bienheureuse Dina Bélanger le désir brûlant de t'offrir, pour le monde entier, les richesses infinies du Coeur de Jésus dans l'Eucharistie, et de vivre, comme Marie, intimement unie au Christ, son unique amour.

Puissions-nous, comme elle, trouver notre joie à accomplir fidèlement ce que tu aimes. Et puisque tu lui as révélé ton grand désir de répandre sur le monde l'abondance de tes grâces, exauce, pour ta plus grande gloire, la prière que nous confions à son intercession. Amen.

In English (our translation): Good Father, you placed in Blessed Dina Bélanger's heart the burning desire to offer you, for the whole world, the infinite riches of the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist, and to live, like Mary, closely united to Christ, her only love. May we, like her, find our joy in faithfully doing what you love. And since you revealed to her your great desire to pour out the abundance of your graces on the world, grant, for your greater glory, the prayer we entrust to her intercession. Amen.

Blessed Dina Bélanger, pray for us.