Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1700)

A family of the Champagne bourgeoisie

Marguerite Bourgeoys was born in Troyes, Champagne, on 17 April 1620 — a Good Friday.^[10][11] She was the sixth of twelve children of Abraham Bourgeoys, a master chandler and minter at the Troyes Mint, and Guillemette Garnier.^[12][13] The family belonged to that merchant and artisan bourgeoisie, well-off without being noble, which gave the France of the Grand Siècle many of its most remarkable religious figures. Nothing in this Troyes childhood suggested that this young girl would one day become the co-foundress of an American city.

The procession of 7 October 1640: the gaze that changed everything

At twenty, on 7 October 1640, feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Marguerite took part in a procession organized by the canonesses of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains Abbey in Troyes. Raising her eyes to a statue of the Virgin placed above the abbey portal, she experienced a sudden inner transformation: the statue's face seemed to come alive and touch her with a beauty and gentleness she would never forget.^[14][15] It is the founding event she would date, all her life, as the starting point of her vocation.

John Paul II would return to this episode on the very day of her canonization, seeing in it the origin of a Marian trust that would never fail her:

"For Marguerite Bourgeoys, it was on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and from then on, throughout her whole life, the Virgin inwardly sustained her risky undertakings: 'Go, I will never abandon you.'" — John Paul II, canonization homily, St Peter's Basilica, 31 October 1982^[16]

The extern congregation of Notre-Dame and the school of Pierre Fourier

Following this grace, Marguerite joined the extern congregation of Notre-Dame attached to the canonesses' convent in Troyes — a pious association of laywomen, non-cloistered, devoted to prayer and works of charity and teaching.^[17] This extern congregation was itself linked to the educational work founded in 1597 by the canon regular Pierre Fourier (1565-1640) and Blessed Alix Le Clerc (1576-1622), in the Duchy of Lorraine: the Canonesses of St Augustine of the Congregation of Notre-Dame, whose founding text of 1598 already set the ambition to "establish public schools and there teach girls free of charge to read, to write, needlework and Christian doctrine".^[18]

It was in this pedagogical mould — open, free schools combining instruction and Christian formation, without the austerities of the great contemplative orders — that Marguerite Bourgeoys was formed for twelve years, under the direction of Mother Louise de Chomedey de Sainte-Marie, directress of the Troyes extern congregation and… sister of Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the future governor of Ville-Marie.^[19][20] This spiritual kinship, seemingly anecdotal, would be the door through which Canada entered Marguerite's life.

Meeting Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve (1652)

In 1652, Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve — governor of the young colony of Ville-Marie, founded ten years earlier on the island of Montreal — returned to France seeking reinforcements for a bloodless colony, decimated by epidemics and Iroquois attacks. Passing through Troyes, he visited his sister, Mother Louise de Chomedey, and asked her for a secular schoolmistress for the colony: he had refused to bring cloistered nuns, judging their enclosure incompatible with the conditions of a fledgling colony.^[21][22]

Marguerite, then thirty-three years old, volunteered. Maisonneuve accepted. The proposal he made her was disarmingly frank — and has remained famous in the congregation's tradition: he could guarantee her nothing but the dangers and privations of a colony on the verge of annihilation, but he promised her the freedom to live out her educational project there without enclosure.^[23] It was the tipping point of an entire life: from a devout laywoman in a provincial town, Marguerite Bourgeoys became, within months, the future foundress of a work that would span three centuries and a continent.

Arrival at Ville-Marie

Marguerite left Troyes in February 1653.^[24] After a gruelling crossing aboard the Saint-Nicolas, she landed at Quebec on 22 September 1653, then reached Ville-Marie on 16 November 1653, at the end of a risky river journey up the St Lawrence, through a region then in open war with the Iroquois Confederacy.^[25][26] At the time of her arrival, Ville-Marie numbered only a handful of families entrenched behind a palisade of stakes: not yet a town, barely a fortified outpost at the far tip of New France.

"Servant of the colony": five years without a school (1653-1658)

Contrary to what her initial project had led her to hope, Marguerite Bourgeoys could open no school for five long years. Infant mortality was such, and births so rare in a besieged colony, that there were simply not yet enough school-age children in Ville-Marie.^[27] Far from lamenting it, she made herself useful wherever she was needed: she visited families from house to house to teach them to read and write, she cared for the first surviving newborn of the colony, and she assisted Jeanne Mance — co-foundress of Ville-Marie and nursing foundress of the Hôtel-Dieu — in caring for the sick and wounded.^[28]

This period, which biographers sometimes call the years of the "servant of the colony", already reveals the most constant trait of Marguerite Bourgeoys' character: total availability to whatever Providence set before her, without rigid attachment to her own initial plan. She waited five years for her school without complaining or forcing events.

The Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours pilgrimage chapel

As early as 1655, she gathered the colonists to build a pilgrimage chapel dedicated to the Virgin, outside the palisade, on land she obtained from Maisonneuve.^[29] The works, delayed by a change of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and by the constant danger of Iroquois raids, resumed only in 1675, and the first Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel was completed only in 1678 — the oldest stone church still standing in Montreal today, though largely rebuilt after a fire in 1754.^[30] A wooden statuette of the Virgin and Child, dating from the 16th century and brought from France by Marguerite herself, was found intact in the rubble of the 1754 fire — an episode Montreal popular piety has ever since retained as a sign of Marian protection over the foundress' work.^[31] A photograph of the facade taken by Conrad Poirier in October 1938, kept at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, shows the chapel in its 20th-century state, well after the foundress' time.^[32] This devotion inaugurated, in Montreal, a Marian pilgrimage tradition that continues to this day in Old Montreal.

The stable turned into a classroom

On 30 April 1658, Maisonneuve finally put at Marguerite Bourgeoys' disposal a disused stone stable, thirty-six feet long and eighteen wide, near the Saint-Joseph Hospital.^[33] Marguerite and a few colonists patched it up into a classroom: in this modest building was born the first school of Montreal — and one of the very first schools for girls and boys in all of French North America.^[34][35]

That same year, 1658, aware that she could not alone carry the burden of a work called to grow, Marguerite returned to France to recruit companions. She brought back three — Edmée Châtel, Marie Raisin and Anne Hiou — along with a servant to assist them.^[36] It was the first of the three great recruiting voyages that would punctuate her life.

A pedagogy of closeness, against closed boarding schools

Marguerite Bourgeoys' pedagogical choice was, for the time, deliberately counter-current. While girls' education then most often took place in closed boarding schools, cut off from families, she wanted instead schools open to the field, close to homes, in constant dialogue with parents. John Paul II highlighted precisely this trait in his canonization homily:

"Instead of drawing pupils into boarding schools in the great city [...], she prefers schools out in the field, close to the people, constantly open to the presence and suggestions of parents." — John Paul II, canonization homily, 31 October 1982^[37]

This pedagogy of closeness, inherited from the spirit of Pierre Fourier but adapted to the harsh conditions of the colony, would become the hallmark of the Congregation of Notre-Dame for more than three centuries: schools free for the poor, also open to the daughters of well-off families, combining elementary instruction, training in "works of the hands" and catechism.^[38]

Recruiting voyages to France

After the first return of 1658, Marguerite Bourgeoys crossed the Atlantic two more times for the needs of her fledgling work — a considerable physical and logistical feat for a woman of her time, on ships where the crossing lasted several weeks and where shipwreck was never out of the question.

The Filles du Roy and the formation of future mothers

From the 1660s onward, King Louis XIV financed the sending to New France of several hundred young women, orphaned or of modest condition — the Filles du Roy (King's Daughters) — destined to marry the unmarried colonists and populate the colony. Marguerite Bourgeoys and her companions welcomed some of them on arrival, lodged them, taught them domestic tasks and the faith, and prepared them for marriage; colonists seeking wives came to meet the candidates under the benevolent but firm supervision of the sisters.^[43] John Paul II saw in this little-known ministry one of the saint's most decisive services to the fledgling colony:

"esteeming them all precious 'like drops of the blood of Our Lord'. She wants to prepare them to be good mothers of families, through a complete education." — John Paul II, canonization homily, 31 October 1982^[44]

The Pope added that she deemed it essential to do everything to "lay the foundations of solid and healthy families".^[45]

This work, far from mere social assistance, belonged for Marguerite Bourgeoys to a profoundly theological vision of Christian marriage: preparing stable and devout homes meant building, for the long term, the fledgling Church of Canada, a generation even before the first rural parishes were built.

The mission to Indigenous girls: the Mountain village

Around 1678, Marguerite Bourgeoys sent companions to teach in bark cabins at the Mountain village, where converted Indigenous families, Algonquin and Iroquois, were gathered.^[46] From this mission came the first two Indigenous sisters formed by the Congregation of Notre-Dame: Marie-Thérèse Gannensagouas, an Algonquin, and Marie-Barbe Atontinon, an Iroquois.^[47] This openness to Indigenous girls — contemporary with the life of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the "Lily of the Mohawks", who grew up and converted in the same generation and the same missionary world — belonged to the great evangelizing effort carried in New France by the Jesuits, notably Saint Jean de Brébeuf and Saint Isaac Jogues, martyrs of the Huron and Iroquois mission a few years earlier.

Civil and canonical recognition (1671-1698)

Marguerite Bourgeoys' work grew without stable legal status for nearly twenty years. King Louis XIV put an end to this precariousness with letters patent granted in May 1671, following Marguerite's second recruiting voyage: the king praised a community that had taught young girls free of charge the works suited to earning their living, cleared land and developed a farming enterprise in the colony's service.^[48][49] This civil recognition was not yet ecclesial recognition: it took until 1676 for the Bishop of Quebec, Bishop François de Laval, to approve the community canonically as a secular religious congregation.^[50][51] Finally, in 1698, under Bishop de Saint-Vallier, the Constitutions of the Congregation were definitively approved, and the sisters pronounced simple vows on 1 July 1698 — the canonical crowning of a community born, forty years earlier, in a stable.^[52]

This long and prudent path — first civil, then diocesan canonical, then constitutional recognition — was no accident of circumstance: it was the fruit of a deliberate choice by Marguerite Bourgeoys, anxious that her community remain non-cloistered so it could keep teaching "in the field", as close as possible to the colony's families, without the enclosure constraints that canon law then imposed on the classic women's religious orders.^[53]

The fire of 1683

On the night of 6 to 7 December 1683, a fire destroyed the mother house of the Congregation. Two young candidates, Marguerite Sommillard and Geneviève Durosoy, perished in the flames.^[54] Marguerite Bourgeoys, then sixty-three, at once took charge of rebuilding and of the community, refusing to let this tragedy end the work begun thirty years earlier.

The mystery of the Visitation, model of the "voyaging life"

Marguerite Bourgeoys' spirituality is rooted entirely in the mystery of the Visitation: Mary rising in haste to go and serve her cousin Elizabeth (Lk 1:39-56). From this mystery, Marguerite drew the model of a non-cloistered congregation, literally on the move, called to "go out" to families rather than wait for them behind an enclosure.^[55] In the three Atlantic crossings she made herself, and in the repeated sending of her sisters to Lachine, Pointe-aux-Trembles, Batiscan, Champlain or the Mountain village, she saw so many concrete extensions of this Marian "voyaging life" (vie voyagère).

Devotion to the Holy Family

Marguerite Bourgeoys also nourished a deep devotion to the Holy Family of Nazareth, which she proposed as a model to the young couples she prepared for marriage through the Filles du Roy. The Nazareth home — work, poverty embraced, daily prayer, mutual obedience in love — appeared to her as the natural pattern for a colony where everything had to be built from nothing.^[56] This devotion, common in 17th-century French spirituality but rarely put into practice with such concrete constancy, permeates all her educational work: to teach a girl, for Marguerite, was always to prepare her to become, in her turn, the heart of a Christian home.

"Drops of the blood of Our Lord"

Marguerite Bourgeoys' respect for each child entrusted to her schools is summed up in a striking image, which she used to justify her pedagogy of gentleness: every little girl, however poor and rustic her origins, was in her eyes "a drop of the blood of Our Lord".^[57] This theological conviction — the infinite dignity of each soul redeemed by Christ, whatever its social rank — directly commanded her method: few corrections, and "always with prudence and extreme moderation", according to the testimony gathered by her first biographers.^[58] She thus refused both the corporal severity fashionable in some schools of her time and laxity: between the two, a patient firmness, turned entirely toward respect for the child's soul.

Resignation and the Writings of 1698

In 1693, aged seventy-three, Marguerite Bourgeoys resigned her office as superior; Marie Barbier succeeded her as superior general.^[59] Far from withdrawing from all activity, Marguerite continued to serve the community and, in 1698, at seventy-eight, wrote her memoirs — a spiritual account of her life meant to preserve the community's original spirit at a time when canonical reforms were softening some of its austerities.^[60] The autograph manuscripts of these writings were destroyed by two later fires, in 1768 and 1893; only copies survive today, kept in the Congregation's archives in Montreal and at the Vatican.^[61]

Giving her life for a dying sister (12 January 1700)

At the end of 1699, a young sister of the Congregation, Catherine Charly, fell gravely ill and seemed about to die. According to the testimony gathered by her first biographers, Marguerite Bourgeoys, then seventy-nine, offered her own life to God so that the young sister's might be spared.^[62] Soon after, Sister Charly recovered her health — while Marguerite was seized by a sudden fever from which she would not recover. She died at Ville-Marie on 12 January 1700, aged seventy-nine, and was buried the next day, 13 January, in Montreal's parish church.^[63] Following the custom of the time for venerated foundresses, the parish kept her body while the Congregation kept her heart as a relic.^[64] At her death, the community she had founded numbered about forty sisters — a modest figure, destined to grow considerably in the following centuries.^[65]

From venerable to blessed (1869-1950)

Marguerite Bourgeoys' cause for canonization opened in Montreal in 1869, at the initiative of Bishop Ignace Bourget, Bishop of Montreal, then was introduced to the Roman Curia in 1878.^[66] She was declared venerable by Pope Leo XIII in 1878.^[67] Two healings judged inexplicable by medicine — those of Joseph Descoteaux, of Saint-Célestin (Quebec), and John Ludger Lacroix, of Saint-Johnsbury (Vermont), both threatened with amputation for gangrene of the foot and healed overnight after imploring her intercession — were retained as miracles for beatification after medical and ecclesiastical inquiry.^[68] Marguerite Bourgeoys was beatified on 12 November 1950 by Pope Pius XII.

The miracle retained for the 1982 canonization

In the night of 14 to 15 June 1968, a twenty-one-year-old woman, Lise Gauthier, suffering from terminal cancer and having already received the last rites, was entrusted with a relic of Blessed Marguerite Bourgeoys; the sisters of the mother house joined in prayer for her healing. The next morning, the doctors found no trace of the cancer.^[69] This case, examined by the Roman Congregation for the Causes of Saints, was retained as the canonization miracle. On 24 May 1982, the consistory of cardinals voted for canonization, solemnly celebrated in Rome on 31 October 1982.^[70][71]

The table below summarizes the main stages of ecclesial recognition:

"Mother of the Colony": John Paul II's homily

On the day of the canonization, John Paul II took up the nickname Montreal had given Marguerite Bourgeoys: "Mother of the Colony" — "She whom people in Montreal were able to call", says the homily.^[72] He stressed that her holiness was not built in a cloister withdrawn from the world, but at the very heart of the nascent civil life of an entire country still to be built — in schools, hospitals, homes, ocean crossings, fires and epidemics. On the eve of the canonization, 30 October 1982, in an address to the Canadian and French pilgrims gathered in Rome, the Pope already underlined the missionary fruitfulness of this "voyaging life" wholly turned toward the concrete service of the colony's most vulnerable.^[73]

The Congregation of Notre-Dame today

At Marguerite Bourgeoys' death in 1700, the Congregation of Notre-Dame numbered about forty sisters. In 1961, at the peak of its expansion, it gathered 6,644 sisters in 262 houses, in Canada, the United States and as far as Japan, teaching some one hundred thousand pupils.^[74] Like most Western teaching congregations, the Congregation of Notre-Dame has since undergone significant demographic decline: it numbered about 860 to 870 sisters around 2020, and announced its scheduled departure from its historic Montreal estate by 2030, owing to the ageing of its members.^[75] The educational work founded in a stable in 1658 nevertheless continues, in renewed forms, in several countries — the Congregation, founded in 17th-century Montreal by Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, presents itself today as a Catholic women's congregation present on four continents.^[76]

Patronage and places of memory

Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys is venerated as co-foundress of Montreal, alongside Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance, and as patroness of teachers and Christian education in Canada. The Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel, which she had built, remains today an active Marian pilgrimage site in Old Montreal, housing the Marguerite-Bourgeoys museum.^[77] In 1975, the Canadian Post Office dedicated a commemorative stamp to her.^[78] A contemporary of Saint Mary of the Incarnation, foundress of the Quebec Ursulines in the same generation, she embodies with her the decisive place held by consecrated women in planting the Church in Canadian soil — one through cloistered contemplative life, the other through a deliberately "voyaging" and non-cloistered apostolic life, two complementary faces of the missionary holiness of the French Grand Siècle.

At the end of a life that began in a family of Troyes chandlers and ended in a besieged lumberjacks' colony, Marguerite Bourgeoys proved, as John Paul II recalled, that holiness can be built entirely in the service of the concrete — a school, a chapel, a crossing, a family to prepare — without ever losing sight of the Marian mystery which, since 7 October 1640, never ceased to carry her: "Go, I will never abandon you."^[79]

• Saint François de Laval (1623-1708) — first Bishop of Quebec, who canonically approved the Congregation of Notre-Dame in 1676.
• Saint Mary of the Incarnation (1599-1672) — foundress of the Quebec Ursulines in the same generation, another great woman of New France.
• Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) — young converted Indigenous woman, a contemporary of Marguerite Bourgeoys' educational mission to Indigenous girls.
• Saint Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649) and Saint Isaac Jogues (1607-1646) — Jesuit martyrs of the Huron and Iroquois mission, a few years before Marguerite Bourgeoys' arrival.
• The Catholic Reformation — the great movement of spiritual and missionary regeneration of which the planting of the Church in New France was one of the fruits.