‘Auntie Babsie’ had the Spirit of a loving mother

    How could any woman be so happy?
God only knows.
    The way Babsie Bleasdell explained it to legions of people around the world – and especially to the people in her adopted hometown of New Orleans – her life changed one day when she was baptized in the Holy Spirit. It was on that day that the grandmother from Trinidad with the silver hair and the 24-karat smile – the woman known to the world as “Auntie Babsie” – did a 180.
    It’s easy to get caught up in the ethereal whirlwind of a retreat experience only to hit the brick wall of reality. Babsie had gone through a painful divorce, but her life changed when an Irish priest visited her prayer group in Trinidad and suggested they invoke the Holy Spirit.
    Babsie made a decision that night to recite a prayer to the Holy Spirit: “I promise to be submissive in everything that you ask of me and accept whatever you permit to happen to me.”
     At that moment, she said, her life became simultaneously “a war zone” and “the most exciting time in my life.”
    The next morning presented the first challenge to her piety and submission. She was running a little late for work and saw her bus, a few feet away on the opposite side of the street, pulling away without waiting for her. She stomped her feet and jumped up and down, just like her old self, but then suddenly remembered the promise she had made the night before.
    After making a quick apology to God, a friend drove by, stopped her car and offered to take her to work. She got there five minutes early.
    “I sat there (at my desk) smiling,” Babsie recalled. “That was the first experience for me where I made a decision, struggled through it and won the prize of a miracle. From then on, I would remember that incident and I would repeat that prayer until the peace and the assurance came, which has never failed. That is how Christ wooed me in.”
    Babsie died July 22 at age 92 in Arima, Trinidad, but not before having touched thousands of people through her witness at conferences and retreats with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and Magnificat Ministry to Women and in appearances on EWTN and in talks to priests. She first came to New Orleans in 1982 to speak at the Southern Regional Conference of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and her message of love and forgiveness began to explode across the country.
    At that first CCRNO conference, Patti Mansfield, who runs the ministry with her husband Al, was sitting behind the stage with her young child on her lap.
    “I remember Babsie saying something that stayed with me – ‘I decided at a certain point in my life never to say no to God,’” Mansfield said. “That’s the same vow that Mother Teresa had made. Her generosity in serving people and her zeal were just enormous.”
    Holy Family Sister Mary Charlotte Rubit met Babsie for the first time in the 1980s, and she was immediately drawn in not just by her words but by her powerful “presence.”
    “She was a big woman with a big smile and a big personality – she was a Momma,” Sister Charlotte said. “She had a big laugh. She would hold your hand, just like a mother. When she prayed over you, you knew you were being prayed over.”
    Once after a full day of speaking engagements, Babsie came home with Sister Charlotte, and her feet were swollen from spending so much time standing up.
    “She was tired and I knelt down with a wash basin and washed her feet,” Sister Charlotte said. “She thought that was the greatest thing – having a nun kneel down and wash her feet.”
    In her dozens of visits to New Orleans, she regularly stayed at the home of Rose Payne, a parishioner at St. Paul the Apostle Church. Babsie said she liked to follow the Scriptural admonition to enter a town and stay where she was received with hospitality. She expected no special treatment.
    “She loved to cook, and when push came to shove, she got in the kitchen, and we had a lot of good laughs together,” Payne said. “She wasn’t up on a pedestal. She would immediately pray with you if you had a problem.”
    Thousands of people, Payne said, came back to the church because of her prophetic encouragement to go all-in with Christ and never look back.
    When Babsie traveled to Africa to preach, her constant theme to those whose history was battered by oppression and slavery was simple – forgiveness.
    “Trinidad is a country of a million and a half people of different races and ethnic groups,” she said. “Many of us have slavery as our roots. I give gratitude to God. In exchange for slavery, he gave me the liberating power of Jesus Christ, so extreme that slavery has no hold over me. I can say from my heart, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’”
    Marilyn Quirk invited Babsie to speak at virtually every major event sponsored by Magnificat, and she visited her in Trinidad, where Babsie had a Blessed Sacrament chapel in her home. No matter how early Quirk got to the chapel each morning, Babsie was already there.
    “I can just see her,” Quirk said. “When someone would ask her something, she would say, ‘Child, be at peace. God is with you.’ She would just say, ‘Child.’ You kind of looked to her as a mother. As a mother, she was always giving life.”
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]