At Montreal in Canada, Saint Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, religious, who, a wife and mother left a widow, piously raised her two sons toward the path of the priesthood and devoted all her strength to caring for the sick, the aged, and the wretched of every kind, for whom she founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity.
Lifespan: 1701–1771
Beatified: 3 May 1959 by Pope John XXIII
Canonized: 9 December 1990 by Pope John Paul II, Vatican Basilica
Memoria liturgica: 23 December
“Comfort, yes, comfort my people” (cf. Isaiah 40:1)
Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais was born on 15 October 1701 in Varennes, Québec, the eldest of six children of Christophe Dufrost de Lajemmerais and Marie-Renée Gaultier de Varennes. At the age of seven she was left fatherless, his death leaving the family in great poverty. Thanks to the interest of her great-grandfather Pierre Boucher, she was nonetheless able to complete two years of study with the Ursulines of Québec, who discovered in her an already well-tempered character and a precocious maturity.
Returning home, she helped her mother in caring for the household and in educating her younger brothers and sisters.
In Montreal, where she had in the meantime moved with her mother after her mother’s remarriage, she met François d’Youville, whom she married in 1722. Great sufferings now began for her: her husband’s neglect of the family — he was given to trading alcohol with the Indians — and above all the death in infancy of four of her six children.
She nursed her husband with tender care through the sudden and grave illness that struck him, until his death in 1730.
The young widow, with immense faith in the Fatherhood of God, then set in motion a multitude of charitable works. Even as she watched over the education of her two sons — who would both become priests — on 21 November 1737 she welcomed a blind woman into her home. Then, together with three companions who shared her ideals, on 31 December of the same year she consecrated herself to God to serve him in the person of the destitute. Without being aware of it, Marguerite thereby became the foundress of the Institute later known as the Sisters of Charity of Montreal — the “Grey Nuns.”
Taking her stand beside the poorest, despite frail health, she pressed boldly forward in her charitable work, undeterred by the insults and slanders that came from within her own family circle.
Not even the death of one of her associates and the fire that destroyed her home could dampen her ardor; on the contrary, these trials were a spur to deepen still further her commitment to the service of the poor.
Together with her two companions from the earliest days, on 2 February 1745 she undertook to hold everything in common in order to assist a greater number of those in need. Two years later, “the mother of the poor” — as she was by then universally called — assumed direction of the hospital of the Charon Brothers, which had fallen into ruin. She made it a welcoming refuge for all the human miseries that wounded her perceptive eye and maternal heart.
In 1756 a fire devastated the hospital, yet it did not weaken the foundress’s faith or courage: she invited her sisters and the poor to recognize in this trial the passing of God and to praise him for it.
Almost as if foreseeing the future, at the age of 64 she undertook the reconstruction of this house of welcome for all who were in need and in difficulty.
Death came to her on 23 December 1771.