Saint Marguerite d'Youville (1701-1771) was a widow of New France, foundress of the Sisters of Charity of Montreal — the famous "Grey Nuns" — and directress of the Montreal General Hospital for nearly a quarter of a century.[2][3] Granddaughter of a colonial noble family ruined by a disastrous marriage, she was widowed at twenty-eight, burdened with debts and young children, before founding in secret, with three companions, a work that would become one of the greatest charitable congregations in North America.
First mocked under the nickname "grise" — at once an allusion to the colour and to her late husband's alcohol trade — she took over in 1747 the direction of a bankrupt general hospital and methodically rebuilt it, despite two major fires, a war of conquest and the collapse of the colonial currency.[4][5] Her government of the institution, where the poor, the sick, foundlings and prisoners of war crossed paths, was not without shadowed areas: like most institutions and notables of her time, she and the General Hospital owned persons reduced to domestic slavery — a fact this article does not evade, but places with the historical rigour it requires.[6]
Declared venerable, then beatified by John XXIII on 3 May 1959 under the title "Mother of Universal Charity", she was canonized by John Paul II on 9 December 1990 — becoming the first Canadian born on the country's soil to be inscribed among the saints.[7][8] This article deals with the saint herself; the Congregation of the Grey Nuns as a contemporary institution is mentioned in her legacy, but referred, where relevant, to its own article.
Varennes and Montreal: childhood and youth (1701-1722)
A family of the colonial nobility
Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais was born on 15 October 1701 in Varennes, a small seigneury on the banks of the St. Lawrence, downstream from Montreal.[9][10] She was the eldest of six children of Christophe Dufrost de Lajemmerais, an officer of Breton origin belonging to an old noble family settled in Canada since 1687, and Marie-Renée Gaultier de Varennes, daughter of the governor of Trois-Rivières.[11] Through her mother, she belonged to one of the longest-established families in the colony; through her father, to a recently arrived but well-connected military nobility.
The marriage contract of her parents, like the one she would sign herself later, reflects this rank: she was destined, from birth, for the life of a colonial notable. That promise was broken as early as 1708, when her father died while she was only seven years old, leaving the family in lasting financial straits.[12][13] Her mother then remarried an Irish-born surgeon, Timothy Sullivan — a union which, according to biographers, somewhat clouded young Marguerite's social prospects in a colonial society attentive to alliances.[14]
The Ursuline boarding school in Quebec
Around 1712, at the age of eleven, Marguerite was sent as a boarder to the convent of the Ursulines of Quebec, where she remained for about two years.[15][16] This brief but solid education for the time gave her the rudiments of reading, writing and piety that would structure her whole life — and no doubt also the taste for order and rigorous management she would later deploy at the head of a bankrupt hospital. Around the age of thirteen, she returned to Varennes to assist her mother, now burdened with a blended family of modest means.
An unhappy marriage (1722-1730)
François d'Youville, illicit trade and debts
On 12 August 1722, in Notre-Dame church in Montreal, Marguerite married François-Madeleine You d'Youville, a young man of good family but, in a biographer's words, an "adventurer of doubtful morality".[17] The marriage contract, generous, guaranteed her a dower of six thousand livres — a sign that the Dufrosts remained, despite their straits, a family of rank.[18] But François d'Youville, like his own father before him, engaged in the illicit sale of alcohol to the Indigenous peoples in exchange for furs, a practice formally prohibited by the colonial authorities and a recurring cause of scandal.[19][20]
The couple had six children, four of whom died in infancy; the two survivors, both sons, both entered holy orders — a fact Pope John XXIII himself would recall at her beatification, seeing in it the fruit of an exemplary maternal education within an afflicted home.[21] François d'Youville died on 4 July 1730, after eight years of a marriage biographers unanimously describe as unhappy, leaving Marguerite a widow at twenty-eight, pregnant with her last child, and an estate burdened with debts which she formally renounced through the courts.[22][23]
Widowhood and the interior turning point
It was in the years following this widowhood that Marguerite d'Youville went through what her biographers call her interior conversion: the discovery of a radical trust in divine Providence, which would become the dominant trait of all her later spirituality.[24] Her confessor at the time, the Sulpician M. de Lescöat, is said to have told her one day, as she lamented her lot:
"Take comfort, Madame, God destines you for great works." — M. de Lescöat, confessor of Marguerite d'Youville, quoted by the congregational tradition[25]
These words, retained by all the saint's early biographies, announce with striking accuracy what was to follow: a widow without fortune, burdened with children and debts, would within a few years become the foundress of a charitable work destined to span three centuries.
The secret foundation of the "Grey Nuns" (1737-1745)
The commitment of 31 December 1737
From 1737 onwards, Marguerite d'Youville began taking destitute persons into her home — including, according to tradition, a blind woman — with the help of a few companions.[26] On 31 December 1737, she and three of them — Catherine Cusson, Marie-Catherine Demers Dessermont and Marie-Louise Thaumur de La Source — committed themselves in secret to consecrate their lives to the service of the poor.[27][28] This date is retained as that of the foundation of the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, since the foundation of new religious communities was then, in principle, prohibited in New France without express royal authorization.[29]
Mockery and the nickname of the "grises"
The enterprise immediately met with tenacious hostility. Malicious rumours accused Marguerite d'Youville's companions of carrying on her late husband's alcohol trade; they were derisively nicknamed "les grises" — a cruel pun designating both the colour of their future habit and their supposed state of drunkenness.[30][31] Friends, relatives and even the poor they aided sometimes joined in this mockery.[32] Marguerite d'Youville and her companions did not answer with polemics, but with perseverance: the nickname, turned around with time, would become a name of honour borne proudly by the congregation to this day.
The fire of 1745 and the Primitive Commitment
On the night of 31 January 1745, a fire destroyed the house sheltering the small community.[33] Far from lamenting it, Marguerite d'Youville saw in it a providential occasion for detachment:
"Perhaps we were too comfortable. Now we shall have to live more poorly!" — Marguerite d'Youville, the day after the fire of 1745[34]
Two days later, on 2 February 1745, Marguerite and her companions signed the Primitive Commitment (also called the Act of Union), a founding document by which they bound themselves to pool all their goods in common and to "receive, feed and maintain" as many poor as they could support, for the rest of their lives.[35] This act, which every new religious of the congregation still signs in turn today, marks the passage from a personal and secret commitment to a true community rule of life.[36]
Taking charge of the Montreal General Hospital (1747-1765)
An institution in bankruptcy
Founded in 1694 by the Hospitaller Brothers of Saint Joseph, known as the "Charon Brothers", the Montreal General Hospital declined over the following decades, for lack of vocations and resources, until it found itself, in the mid-1740s, in a state of near-bankruptcy, burdened with a debt of some forty thousand livres.[37] On 27 August 1747, a royal ordinance entrusted Marguerite d'Youville and her companions with the provisional direction of the institution; the effective installation took place on 7 October 1747.[38][39]
Contrary to earlier usage, reserved for men, Marguerite d'Youville opened the hospital to the poor of both sexes, to invalid soldiers, to the elderly, to unwed mothers, to foundlings and, during the war, to wounded British prisoners whom she also had employed for wages.[40][41] A nursery for abandoned infants, opened in 1761, would receive more than three hundred newborns in eleven years.[42]
The ordinance of 1750 and the letters patent of 1753
Marguerite d'Youville's management, at first provisional, was contested: an ordinance of 1750 temporarily revoked her authority, before being annulled the following year thanks to a new administrative inquiry.[43] She prevailed in the end by herself offering to repay in full the debts of the institution — a gesture that carried the royal decision. On 3 June 1753, letters patent of Louis XV officially recognized the community under the name of Sisters of Charity of the Montreal General Hospital and definitively charged it with the administration of the hospital.[44][45]
Under her direction, the institution became a model of economic ingenuity: making veils and tents for the navy, manufacturing hosts and candles, drying and selling tobacco, welcoming paying lady boarders, running a farm and a mill.[46][47] In 1755, the community adopted its distinctive grey-beige habit, a symbol of humility deliberately chosen rather than the black of the great established orders; the popular Montreal saying — "go see the Grey Nuns, they never refuse anything" — attests to the reputation of total availability the community had forged from that time.[48]
| Step | Date | Nature of the act |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinance of provisional direction | 27 August 1747 | Colonial authority |
| Effective installation at the General Hospital | 7 October 1747 | — |
| Ordinance revoking the management | 1750 | Administrative contestation |
| Annulment of the revocation | 1751 | New inquiry |
| Definitive royal letters patent | 3 June 1753 | Louis XV |
| Adoption of the grey-beige habit | 1755 | Community constitution |
The War of Conquest and the fire of 18 May 1765
During the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), Marguerite d'Youville and her sisters cared indiscriminately for the wounded of both camps, French and British.[49] After the Conquest, the British military governor James Murray — then, according to some sources, his successor Thomas Gage — recognized this service with a one-time gift to the Sisters of Charity, a sign of esteem reaching across the change of regime rather than of reproach.[50] The brutal devaluation of French paper money, with the fall of the colonial regime, nevertheless deprived the hospital of much of the sums owed to it: of the 120,800 livres hoped for, it would receive only 40,100.[51]
On 18 May 1765, a major fire ravaged more than a hundred houses in Montreal, including the General Hospital itself: eighteen infirm sisters, seventeen lady boarders, some sixty poor and some fifteen illegitimate children found themselves on the street.[52] Faced with the disaster, Marguerite d'Youville gathered her terrified daughters and ordered them, before any other step, to give thanks:
"Let us go and thank God on our knees for the cross He has just sent us, by reciting the Te Deum." — Marguerite d'Youville, on the night of the fire of 18 May 1765[53]
She then added, with an assurance that would remain famous in the Grey Nuns' tradition: "Be at peace, the house will never burn again."[54] Reconstruction began the following month, with financial help from the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice; the hospital would be entirely freed from its debts around 1769.[55] A year before her death, Marguerite d'Youville herself summed up the scale of the burden borne by her small community: "We are eighteen Sisters, all infirm, running a house where there are one hundred and seventy mouths to feed."[56]
Did Marguerite d'Youville own slaves?
A rigorous encyclopaedia cannot pass over in silence a fact now well documented: Marguerite d'Youville, like her husband before her and like the General Hospital she directed, owned persons reduced to slavery — a practice then legal and socially commonplace in New France.[57] The historian Marcel Trudel, in his founding work Slavery in French Canada (1960), counts some 4,200 persons reduced to slavery in the Laurentian territory between the mid-17th century and 1834, nearly three-quarters of them of Indigenous origin — the "Panis" — and one quarter of African origin; the Church, all institutions combined, held about a hundred of them, essentially as domestics.[58]
What the archives show, and what they do not show
According to Trudel himself, Marguerite d'Youville personally owned three or four domestic slaves, and the General Hospital held three during the period of her direction — figures that place her far from the thirty largest owners recorded by the historian (ten to thirty slaves each).[59] The historian Dominique Laperle, in a study published in 2022 by the Canadian Catholic Historical Association devoted precisely to examining how online encyclopaedias treat this matter, combed through the General Hospital's account books and concluded: "the General Hospital's participation in the slave trade cannot be demonstrated".[60] She notes moreover that some of the persons presented by certain notices as "slaves bought and sold" by Marguerite d'Youville were in reality British prisoners of war, whose custody unambiguously fell to the military authority of the time, not to private trade.[61]
Laperle never denies the central fact — "the purpose of this text is not to deny that the General Hospital and Marguerite d'Youville owned slaves. That is an established fact"[62] — but she invites historical nuance rather than anachronism: persons reduced to slavery in New France, unlike the colonial system of the West Indies or the southern British colonies, were most often baptized, bore their owner's surname, could marry, received Christian burial and could testify in court or at weddings — a reality that in no way erases the radical injustice of their condition, but which distinguishes the French colonial context from the Atlantic plantation trade.[63]
A moral judgment the Church now makes without ambiguity
This article seeks neither to excuse nor to minimize this fact: the possession of human beings, in whatever form, is now recognized by the Magisterium itself as an intrinsic evil. The Second Vatican Council explicitly ranks slavery among the practices that "dishonour civilization" and "corrupt those who practise them more than they humiliate those who suffer them", listing it alongside the gravest attacks on human dignity.[64] John Paul II, in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, takes up this list and qualifies as "intrinsically evil" the actions that reduce the human being to a mere instrument of profit, including slavery.[65]
Marguerite d'Youville lived in a society where this practice, although already condemned in principle by some theologians since the 16th century — the bull Sublimis Deus of Paul III (1537) affirms from that time the full humanity and natural freedom of the peoples subjected to colonization — nevertheless remained a social fact unquestioned by the immense majority of her contemporaries, including among the clergy and the most charitable religious congregations.[66] Recognizing this shadowed part in no way diminishes the authenticity of her devotion to the poorest; it simply recalls that no human holiness is exercised outside the time and the collective blindnesses of its age — a truth the most serious Catholic hagiography has always recognized, rather than concealing it.
The spirituality of Marguerite d'Youville
An absolute trust in Providence
The most constant trait of Marguerite d'Youville's spirituality is a radical trust in divine Providence, forged in the trial of widowhood and poverty. She expresses it herself in words of disarming simplicity:
"I leave everything to divine Providence, my trust is in her; all will happen in a manner pleasing to God." — Marguerite d'Youville[67]
This trust never stops at passive resignation: it goes together with methodical, almost entrepreneurial action in the service of the poor. Marguerite d'Youville herself sums up this union of abandonment and initiative when she declares, concerning the contested management of the General Hospital: "If God calls us to govern this house, His design will succeed; the obstacles and the opposition of men must not trouble us."[68]
Service of the poor without any distinction
The second characteristic of her spirituality is the refusal of all hierarchy in charity: men and women, settlers and enemy prisoners, legitimate children and foundlings, all find a place at the General Hospital without distinction of status or merit.[69] John Paul II, at the canonization, saluted precisely this quality:
"The foundress of the 'Grey Nuns' gives us a great example: she knew how to master her disappointments, to accept suffering as the cross of Christ. Abandoned into the hands of Providence, she continued on her way in hope. Trust never left her… She placed her whole life entirely in the hands of the Creator." — John Paul II, canonization homily, St Peter's Basilica, 9 December 1990[70]
This saying sums up, better than any other, a whole life marked by bereavement, slander, bankruptcy and fire, but never by discouragement. John XXIII, thirty-one years earlier, had already sensed this inner spring when declaring her blessed:
"Supernatural love of the poor, the sick, the disinherited, was the secret spring that animated this great soul." — John XXIII, address to the Canadian pilgrims, 4 May 1959[71]
Death and the last days (1771)
Struck by a first attack on 9 December 1771, then a second on 13 December, Marguerite d'Youville died in Montreal on 23 December 1771, around half past eight in the evening, at the age of seventy.[72][73] According to a testimony gathered by the congregational tradition, a luminous cross is said to have appeared in the sky at the very moment of her death — an episode hagiography retains without making it a foundation of the canonization cause, which rests on quite distinct criteria.[74] Her remains, first kept at the General Hospital, were transferred in 2010 to the Basilica of Sainte-Anne de Varennes, in her native parish.[75][76]
The cause of canonization
From venerable to blessed (1890-1959)
Her spiritual writings having been approved by theologians on 1 February 1888, the cause for beatification was formally introduced on 28 April 1890 and she received the title of Servant of God[77]; she was declared venerable by Pius XII on 3 May 1955, by the decree on the heroicity of virtues.[78] She was then beatified by Pope John XXIII on 3 May 1959. The next day, receiving the Canadian pilgrims come to Rome for the occasion, the Pope hailed in her a nascent national glory:
"It is the first time that a flower of holiness blossomed on the very soil of Canada comes to full bloom beneath the vaults of St Peter's." — John XXIII, address to the Canadian pilgrims, 4 May 1959[79]
He recalled on that occasion that she had been "a virtuous wife in misfortune, a widow full of dignity and courage, an exemplary mother", two of whose six children became priests, and that her spirit then animated, in 1959, some seven thousand religious spread across six independent branches throughout the world.[80]
The canonization miracle and the testimony of a haematologist
The miracle retained for the canonization is the lasting and medically inexplicable remission of a young patient suffering from acute myeloblastic leukaemia, a grave form of blood cancer then judged hopeless.[81] The file acquired particular notoriety thanks to the testimony of the Canadian haematologist Jacalyn Duffin, then a young physician, called upon to examine the patient's blood slides "blind" without being told what use would be made of it: her diagnosis confirmed the extreme gravity of the initial case, which makes the lasting cure all the more inexplicable to medicine.[82] Duffin would only discover later that her expert opinion had served as a medical piece in the Roman file for Marguerite d'Youville's canonization cause; the episode engaged her in extensive research on the place of medicine in canonization processes, published in 2009 under the title Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World.[83]
On 9 December 1990, in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, John Paul II canonized Marguerite d'Youville, making her the first Canadian born on the country's soil to be inscribed among the saints of the Catholic Church.[84][85]
| Step | Date | Pope |
|---|---|---|
| Opening of the cause (Servant of God) | 28 April 1890 | Leo XIII |
| Decree of venerability (heroicity of virtues) | 3 May 1955 | Pius XII |
| Beatification | 3 May 1959 | John XXIII |
| Canonization | 9 December 1990 | John Paul II |
Legacy and posterity
The Grey Nuns today
At Marguerite d'Youville's death, in 1771, her community numbered only a handful of religious; in 1959, at the time of her beatification, there were already some seven thousand of them, spread across several autonomous branches.[86] These branches, founded from the 1840s onwards by offshoots from the mother house in Montreal, spread in turn to Saint-Hyacinthe (1840), Ottawa (1845, under the impetus of Sister Élisabeth Bruyère), Quebec City (1849), Manitoba (1844) and Alberta (1859), then to the United States (1855), Brazil (1957) and Africa (Tunisia, Cameroon, Nigeria, former Zaire, in the 1960s-1970s).[87] Like most Western teaching and hospital congregations, the Grey Nuns have since experienced a marked demographic decline, without the work founded in a bankrupt hospital of the French Regime ceasing for all that to continue, in renewed forms, in several countries.[88]
Patronage and places of memory
Saint Marguerite d'Youville remains venerated as the patroness of widows, of Catholic hospitals and of charitable works in Canada. The former Montreal General Hospital, in Old Montreal, now houses the congregation's archives and a museum devoted to its foundress.[89] Her remains have rested since 2010 in the Basilica of Sainte-Anne de Varennes, her native village.[90] A contemporary, a generation apart, of Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, co-foundress of Montreal and foundress of the Congregation of Notre-Dame, she embodies with her the decisive place held by non-cloistered consecrated women in planting the Church on Canadian soil — one through the school, the other through the hospital, but both in concrete service to the most vulnerable of a nascent colony. Her figure also joins, across the border, that of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), herself a widow who became foundress of the Sisters of Charity in the United States two generations later — two North American widows whose mourning was changed, by grace, into universal maternal fruitfulness.
At the end of a life that began in an indebted seigneury and ended at the head of a hospital raised three times from its ruins, Marguerite d'Youville showed, as the two popes who glorified her recalled in turn, that absolute trust in Providence can turn bereavement, slander and fire into a work of charity spanning the centuries.
To go further
- Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1700) — co-foundress of Montreal and foundress of the Congregation of Notre-Dame, a generation before Marguerite d'Youville.
- Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821) — American widow, foundress of the Sisters of Charity in the United States.
- Saint François de Laval (1623-1708) — first bishop of New France, half a century before the episcopate under which Marguerite d'Youville lived.
- The Sisters of Charity of Montreal (Grey Nuns) — the congregation she founded, now present on several continents.
Notes and References
Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Liturgical Calendar Proper to the Dioceses of Canada (approved national calendar, 27 January 2016): cccb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/nationallitcalender2016_01_27.pdf — October: "16. St. Marguerite d'Youville, Religious — Memorial". In the General Roman Calendar, 23 December bears the optional memorial of Saint John of Kanty, priest — Marguerite d'Youville is not inscribed there; 23 December is her dies natalis (death in Montreal on 23 December 1771, attested by Caritatis Praeconium: "die vicesimo tertio mensis Decembris anno millesimo septingentesimo septuagesimo primo"). See also the Canadian Encyclopedia: "St. Marie-Marguerite d'Youville's Catholic feast day is October 16" (thecanadianencyclopedia.ca).
1Claudette Lacelle, "DUFROST DE LAJEMMERAIS, MARIE-MARGUERITE, known as d'Youville", Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4 (1771-1800), Université Laval / University of Toronto, 2003 [1979]: biographi.ca/fr/bio/dufrost_de_lajemmerais_marie_marguerite_4F.html. The reference academic entry, citing notably the French colonial archives (AN, Col., C11A) and Montreal notarial archives (ANQ-M), the archives of the Grey Nuns of Montreal (ASGM), as well as the older biographies by Ferland-Angers and Faillon. Facts retained: birth in Varennes on 15 October 1701; noble family (Dufrost de Lajemmerais, Gaultier de Varennes); marriage on 12 August 1722; illicit alcohol trade of the husband and his father; six children, four dying in infancy; widowhood on 4 July 1730, renunciation of an indebted estate; foundation of 31 December 1737; fire of 1745; taking charge of the General Hospital on 27 August 1747; initial debt of nearly 40,000 livres; royal letters patent of 3 June 1753; economic innovations (sewing, veils, tents, hosts, candles, tobacco); fire of 18 May 1765 affecting 18 sisters, 17 boarders, 63 poor and 16 illegitimate children; acquisition of the Châteauguay seigneury; death on 23 December 1771 after a paralytic attack.
2 4 9 11 12 15 18 19 22 27 30 37 38 40 44 46 49 52 69 73 85Grey Nuns of Montreal, "Our History": sgm.qc.ca/en/the-grey-nuns/our-history/. Institutional source for: the secret commitment of 31 December 1737; the Primitive Commitment (Act of Union) signed on 2 February 1745 after the fire, with the formula "receive, feed and maintain"; the adoption of the grey-beige habit in 1755 and the associated popular saying; the royal letters patent of 1753; the spread of the congregation to Saint-Hyacinthe (1840), Ottawa (1845), Quebec City (1849), Manitoba (1844), Alberta (1859), the United States (1855), Brazil (1957) and Africa (1960-1970); the transfer of the foundress's remains to Varennes in 2010.
3 28 29 35 36 48 75 87 88 90Timeline of women's history in Quebec (Ligne du temps de l'histoire des femmes au Québec), "Marguerite d'Youville (1701-1771)": histoiredesfemmes.quebec/marguerite-dyouville-1701-1771/. Source of the precise dates: birth (15 October 1701), marriage (12 August 1722), widowhood (4 July 1730), foundation (31 December 1737), ordinance of taking charge of the General Hospital (27 August 1747) and installation (7 October 1747), letters patent (1753), ordinance revoking the management (1750) and its annulment (1751), fire of 1745, devaluation of French paper money (120,800 livres hoped for, 40,100 received), death (23 December 1771).
5 10 33 39 43 45 51Dominique Laperle, "La question des esclaves de mère Marguerite d'Youville et de l'Hôpital Général de Montréal dans les notices de Wikipédia" ("The question of Mother Marguerite d'Youville's and the Montreal General Hospital's slaves in the Wikipedia entries"), Canadian Catholic Historical Association (SCHEC), 14 March 2022: schec.ca/la-question-des-esclaves/. Historiographical analysis drawing on the archives of the Grey Nuns of Montreal (entry registers, accounts) and on Marcel Trudel, L'esclavage au Canada français (Slavery in French Canada), Presses de l'Université Laval, 1960. Facts retained: about 4,185 slaves recorded by Trudel in New France/Lower Canada (1632-1834), about three-quarters of them "Panis" (Indigenous) and one quarter of African origin; Marguerite d'Youville and her husband personally owned three or four slaves; the General Hospital owned three during her direction; no proof of a slave trade on the institution's scale; frequent confusion, in certain notices, between domestic slaves and British prisoners of war (whose custody fell to the military authority); gift of the British military governor recognizing Marguerite d'Youville's services after the Conquest; distinctive legal context of French North American slavery (baptism, owner's surname, authorized marriage, Christian burial, possible testimony in court) compared with the Atlantic plantation trade.
6 50 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 66John XXIII, address to the Canadian pilgrims come to Rome for the beatification of Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais, widow d'Youville, 4 May 1959 (text consulted directly on the Holy See's official site): vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/fr/speeches/1959/documents/hf_j-xxiii_spe_19590504_margherita-youville.html. Passages quoted (translated from the French; original French: "la première fleur de sainteté éclose sur le sol même du Canada", "épouse vertueuse dans le malheur, veuve pleine de dignité et de courage, mère exemplaire", "l'amour surnaturel des pauvres, des malades, des déshérités"): on the first "flower of holiness blossomed on the very soil of Canada"; on Marguerite d'Youville "a virtuous wife in misfortune, a widow full of dignity and courage, an exemplary mother", two of whose six children became priests; on "supernatural love of the poor, the sick, the disinherited" as the "secret spring" of her life; on the "some 7,000 religious, grouped in six independent branches" who carried on her work in 1959.
7 21 71 79 80 86John Paul II, homily at the canonization Mass of Marguerite d'Youville, St Peter's Basilica, Rome, 9 December 1990 (official Holy See document, text consulted via its reproduction by Saint-Joseph de Clairval Abbey, Letter to the Friends of Saint-Joseph de Clairval of 30 September 2001, and cross-checked with an independent English reproduction): vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/homilies/1990/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19901209_s-margherita-d-youville.html. Passage quoted (translated from the French; original French: "la fondatrice des « Sœurs grises » nous donne un grand exemple : elle a su maîtriser ses déceptions, accepter la souffrance comme la croix du Christ. Abandonnée entre les mains de la Providence, elle a poursuivi sa route dans l'espérance. La confiance ne l'a jamais quittée… Elle a remis entièrement sa vie entre les mains du Créateur."): "the foundress of the 'Grey Nuns' gives us a great example: she knew how to master her disappointments, to accept suffering as the cross of Christ. Abandoned into the hands of Providence, she continued on her way in hope. Trust never left her… She placed her whole life entirely in the hands of the Creator."; mention of the fact that Marguerite d'Youville becomes, that day, the first native-born Canadian inscribed among the saints.
8 70 84Wikipedia (EN), "Marie-Marguerite d'Youville": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Marguerite_d'Youville. Cross-check used for: the mother's remarriage to the Irish surgeon Timothy Sullivan; the nickname of the "grises" designating both the colour and the supposed state of drunkenness; the stages of ecclesial recognition prior to the 1955 decree (Servant of God, 28 April 1890); the mention by English-language historiography (James W. St. G. Walker) of slaveholding, discussed and nuanced in this article via Laperle (SCHEC).
13 14 20 23 31 32 41 77Holy History of Canada / Histoire Sainte du Canada, "Sainte Marguerite d'Youville": histoiresainteducanada.ca/en/sainte-marguerite-dyouville/. Source of the spiritual quotations directly attributed to Marguerite d'Youville (translated from the French; original French: "Je laisse tout à la divine Providence, ma confiance est en elle ; tout arrivera d'une manière agréable à Dieu"; "Si Dieu nous appelle à gouverner cette maison, son dessein réussira ; les obstacles et l'opposition des hommes ne doivent pas nous troubler"; "Peut-être étions-nous trop à l'aise. Maintenant nous devrons vivre plus pauvrement !"): "I leave everything to divine Providence, my trust is in her; all will happen in a manner pleasing to God"; "If God calls us to govern this house, His design will succeed; the obstacles and the opposition of men must not trouble us"; "Perhaps we were too comfortable. Now we shall have to live more poorly!" the day after the 1745 fire; dates of the boarding school with the Ursulines of Quebec (around 1712-1714); dates and circumstances of the death (attacks of 9 and 13 December 1771, death on 23 December around 8:30 pm); tradition of a luminous cross appearing in the sky at the moment of her death; transfer of her remains to the Basilica of Sainte-Anne de Varennes.
16 24 26 34 67 68 72 74 76Michael Journal (Louis-Marie de Montfort Institute), "Saint Marguerite d'Youville": michaeljournal.org/articles/roman-catholic-church/item/saint-marguerite-d-youville. Source of: the description of François d'Youville as an "adventurer of doubtful morality"; the saying attributed to the confessor M. de Lescöat ("Take comfort, Madame, God destines you for great works"); the quotation on the Te Deum recited on the night of the 1765 fire; the figure of more than 300 foundlings welcomed by the nursery opened in 1761; the complete clearing of the hospital's debts around 1769.
17 25 42 53 55City of Montreal, "Marguerite d'Youville, femme de tête, femme de cœur" ("Marguerite d'Youville, a woman of head and heart"), Mémoires des Montréalais: ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/marguerite-dyouville-femme-de-tete-femme-de-coeur. Complementary source on the administrative innovations of the General Hospital under her direction (sewing, veils, tents, hosts, candles, tobacco, farm, mill).
47Saint-Joseph de Clairval Abbey, "Sainte Marguerite d'Youville", Letter to the Friends of Saint-Joseph de Clairval, 30 September 2001: clairval.com/ste-marguerite-dyouville/ (English version consulted in parallel: clairval.com/en/saint-marguerite-dyouville/). Source of the direct quotations attributed to Marguerite d'Youville (translated from the French; original French: "Soyez tranquilles, la maison ne brûlera plus"; "Nous sommes dix-huit Sœurs, toutes infirmes, qui conduisons une maison où il y a cent soixante-dix personnes à nourrir"): "Be at peace, the house will never burn again" after the fire of 18 May 1765; "We are eighteen Sisters, all infirm, running a house where there are one hundred and seventy mouths to feed", written a year before her death; confirmation of the confessor's name M. de Lescöat and of the two surviving sons who became priests.
54 56Second Vatican Council, pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes, no. 27 (7 December 1965): official text on vatican.va. The text ranks "everything that offends the integrity of the human person" — explicitly including "slavery" — among the practices that "dishonour civilization" and "corrupt those who practise them more than they humiliate those who suffer them".
64John Paul II, encyclical Veritatis Splendor, no. 80 (6 August 1993): official text on vatican.va. Taking up the list of Gaudium et Spes no. 27, the encyclical qualifies as "intrinsically evil" the actions that reduce the human person to an instrument, notably through "slavery" and trafficking in human beings.
65John XXIII, apostolic letter Caritatis Praeconium, 3 May 1959 (official Holy See text): vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/la/apost_letters/1959/documents/hf_j-xxiii_apl_19590503_caritatis-praeconium.html. The letter retraces the official history of the cause: commission of introduction signed by Leo XIII on 28 April 1890 ("Commissio introductionis Causae […] a Leone PP. XIII […] die duodetricesimo mensis Aprilis anno millesimo octingentesimo nonagesimo, obsignata"), then the decree of Pius XII of 3 May 1955 declaring her theological and cardinal virtues practised to a heroic degree ("Pius PP. XII […] edito decreto die tertio mensis Maii anno millesimo nongentesimo quinquagesimo quinto, [virtutes] ab eadem heroum in modum cultas esse, edixit") — the act conferring the title of venerable. No venerability in 1931 under Pius XI appears therein.
78Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009. Academic source (history of medicine) on the miracle retained for the 1990 canonization: lasting and medically inexplicable remission of a young patient suffering from acute myeloblastic leukaemia; testimony of the Canadian haematologist Jacalyn Duffin, called upon to examine the blood slides "blind" without knowing the medico-canonical use that would be made of it, and who discovered only later the link with Marguerite d'Youville's canonization cause — the episode at the origin of her subsequent research on medicine in canonization processes.
81 82 83Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec (Quebec Cultural Heritage Directory), "Maison mère des Soeurs-Grises-de-Montréal": patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/detail.do?methode=consulter&id=92743&type=bien. Source on the heritage status of the former Montreal General Hospital, now the seat of the congregation's archives and a museum devoted to Marguerite d'Youville.
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