Feast Day: January 12th
The year was 1652. On a little island up the St. Lawrence River from Quebec, a small settlement of French colonists was living up to the phrase that the bigger city had named them: “une folle enterprise” [a foolish enterprise]. The little village however called itself “Ville-Marie”, City of Mary, and had been founded to bring the Gospel to the local tribes of the area. From the beginning, those organizing the enterprise had seen it as God’s work and had endured years of work acquiring the land, money, and provisions necessary to establish the colony. They went for no earthly profit, but to build a hospital and school to care for the indigenous population. Delayed by storms, and arriving too late to begin in the fall of 1641, the three ships worth of men, and four intrepid women, finally arrived at the island on May 17th, 1642, building an altar and offering Mass as their first act in their new home.
Ten years later, after relentless attacks from the local Iroquois tribes the population of Ville-Marie was down to 50, with only 17 capable of bearing arms. The leader of the colony, Paul de Chomedey, a man known both for his leadership and his piety, decided to return to France and try to find men willing to come and work (and defend) the little town. If he could not find 100 or more, he told Jeanne Mance (another leader of the enterprise, a woman who was particularly dedicated to the mission’s hospital having received her calling to that charitable work while on pilgrimage in 1640) they would have to abandon the town. It was a long few years before he returned, with 95 recruits, including the extraordinary young woman, Marguerite Bourgeoys.
She was 33 years old and had long delighted in serving the poor in the city of Troyes, France. Marguerite had been a member of the sodality affiliated with the monastery of sisters in that town since she had turned 15, a group of lay women who would teach and take care of the poor girls who could not afford to board in the monastery school. One day in 1652, the resilient, weather-battered de Chomedey came to visit his sister, one of the canonesses in that monastery. Perhaps it was just a visit, perhaps he was begging her prayers for the colony, but either way it was she who pointed her brother to speak with the magnanimous Marguerite. And, in February of 1653, she accepted the daunting task to leave everything behind and lead the establishment of a congregation of women who could teach in that battered far-off village on the St. Lawrence named after Our Lady.
A few years of work and they had built a permanent Church – oddly forgotten during those first difficult years – and a few more years and they had their first permanent school operating – albeit in a vacant stone stable (not unfitting given where her Lord had been born). Marguerite made trips back to France, recruiting more women for the work of educating the poor and indigent population around Ville-Marie, and often bringing back “filles du roi” [king’s daughters] as well, impoverished or orphaned girls from France sent over to the colonies by the Crown. They too were loved and protected by the little community of women headed by Marguerite. Each day the women would pray and eat together, a religious community sustain them amidst the hardships of the work and hold them all to the tremendous vision of teaching held out to them by Marguerite:
Teaching is the work most suited to draw down the graces of God if it is done with purity of intention, without distinction between the poor and the rich, between relatives and friends and strangers, between the pretty and the ugly, the gentle and the grumblers, looking upon them all as drops of Our Lord’s blood
Again and again, church leaders enjoined the community to become cloistered – the almost universal way of life of female congregations at that time – but by 1669, Marguerite’s indefatigable efforts obtained permission from the Apostolic Vicar of New France to continue their active efforts. In 1670 they received a further approval from King Louis XIV. She would establish additional schools over the coming decades, some for different occupations, some in mission villages among the Native communities in the area. By 1692, she was asked to bring her sisters to the city of Quebec and establish there another school for poor girls. Finally, in 1698 the congregation was canonically established, setting a precedent for all active women’s communities today!
Marguerite was widely considered a saint upon her death in 1700, not only from her tremendous missionary work, but also her final years of intense prayer including offering her life so that a younger sister who had fallen ill could be cured.
– Fr. Dominic will leave you with a final quotation from this saint: “It seems to me that we are charcoal ready to be kindled and that Holy Communion is entirely suited to set us on fire. But when this charcoal is kindled only on the surface, as soon as it is set aside, it is extinguished. On the contrary, that which is fired all the way to the centre is not extinguished, but is consumed.” What group around you needs the Love of Christ? Is the Holy Communion you have been given today the fire meant to carry you into that mission?