The real task of her life was to suffer for the Church and for some of its members, whose distress was shown her in spirit, or who asked her prayers without knowing that this poor sick nun had something more to do for them than to say the Pater noster, but that all their spiritual and corporal sufferings became her own, and that she had to endure patiently the most terrible pains, without being assisted, like the contemplatives of former days, by the sympathising prayers of an entire community.  In the age when she lived, she had no other assistance than that of medicine.  While thus enduring sufferings which she had taken upon herself for others, she often turned her thoughts to the corresponding sufferings of the Church, and when thus suffering for one single person, she would likewise offer all she endured for the whole Church.

The following is a remarkable instance of the sort:  During several weeks she had every symptom of consumption; violent irritation of the lungs, excessive perspiration, which soaked her whole bed, a racking cough, continual expectoration, and a strong continual fever.  So fearful were her sufferings that her death was hourly expected and even desired.  It was remarked that she had to struggle strangely against a strong temptation to irritability.  Did she yield for an instant, she burst into tears, her sufferings increased tenfold, and she seemed unable to exist unless she immediately gained pardon in the sacrament of penance.

She had also to combat a feeling of aversion to a certain person whom she had not seen for years.  She was in despair because this person, with whom nevertheless she declared she had nothing in common, was always before her eyes in the most evil dispositions, and she wept bitterly, and with much anxiety of conscience, saying that she would not commit sin, that her grief must be evident to all, and other things which were quite unintelligible to the persons listening to her.  Her illness continued to increase, and she was thought to be on the point of death.  At this moment one of her friends saw her, to his great surprise, suddenly raise herself up on her bed, and say: 

‘Repeat with me the prayers for those in their last agony.’  He did as requested, and she answered the Litany in a firm voice.  After some little time, the bell for the agonising was heard, and a person came in to ask Anne Catherine’s prayers for his sister, who was just dead.  Anne Catherine asked for details concerning her illness and death, as if deeply interested in the subject, and the friend above-mentioned heard the account given by the new comer of a consumption resembling in the minutest particulars the illness of Anne Catherine herself.  The deceased woman had at first been in so much pain and so disturbed in mind that she had seemed quite unable to prepare herself for death; but during the last fortnight she had been better, had made her peace with God, having in the first place been reconciled to a person with whom she was at enmity,