In the city of Lachine in the province of Quebec, Canada, Blessed Marie-Anne (Marie-Stella) Soureau-Blondin, virgin, who, though herself unschooled in letters until her youth, founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne for the education of the children of farmers, ever giving in her ministry an outstanding example as a teacher of the young.
Lifespan: 1809–1890
Beatified: 29 April 2001 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 2 January
A Model of an Existence Devoted to Love, Traversed by the Paschal Mystery
Esther Blondin, in religion Sister Marie-Anne, was born in Terrebonne, Québec, Canada, on 18 April 1809, into a deeply Christian farming family. From her mother she inherited a piety centered on Providence and the Eucharist, and from her father a solid faith and great patience in suffering. Esther and her family were victims of the illiteracy that prevailed in French-Canadian communities of the nineteenth century. At the age of twenty-two she took employment as a domestic servant at the convent of the Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady, who had recently arrived in her village. A year later she enrolled as a boarding student to learn to read and write. She subsequently entered the novitiate of that Congregation, which she was obliged to leave owing to her fragile health.
In 1833, Esther became a teacher at the village school of Vaudreuil. It was there that she discovered one of the root causes of illiteracy in that milieu: a Church regulation that prevented women from teaching boys and men from teaching girls. Unable to fund two parish schools, pastors frequently chose to maintain none at all, and the young remained mired in ignorance, unable to follow catechism instruction or make their First Communion. In 1848, with the boldness of a prophet moved by an irresistible call of the Spirit, Esther presented to her bishop, Ignace Bourget, a project she had long been nurturing: the founding of a religious Congregation “for the education of the poor youth of the countryside in mixed schools.” The project was innovative for the Church of that era — indeed, it seemed “reckless and subversive of the established order.” But, the civil authorities being favorable to such schools, the bishop authorized a modest experiment, so as to prevent a greater evil.
The Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne was founded at Vaudreuil on 8 September 1850, and Esther — now called Mother Marie-Anne — became its first superior. The rapid growth of the young Congregation soon required a move. In the summer of 1853, Bishop Bourget transferred the motherhouse to Saint-Jacques-de-l’Achigan. The new chaplain, Father Louis-Adolphe Maréchal, began to meddle abusively in the community’s internal life. In the Foundress’s absence he altered the pupils’ boarding fees; and, when he himself had to be away, he required the sisters to wait for his return before going to confession. After a year of conflict between the chaplain and the superior — who was concerned to protect the rights of her sisters — Bishop Bourget believed he had found a solution: on 18 August 1854, he asked Mother Marie-Anne to resign. He convened an election and required that Mother Marie-Anne “not accept the mandate of superior again, should the sisters wish to re-elect her.” Deprived of the right her Community’s Rule gave her to be re-elected, Mother Marie-Anne obeyed her bishop, whom she regarded as the instrument of God’s will for her. And she “blessed divine Providence a thousand times for the wholly maternal care it showed her, leading her along the path of tribulation and the cross.”
Appointed director of the convent in the village of Sainte-Geneviève, Mother Marie-Anne became a target of the new motherhouse authorities, who were under the sway of Chaplain Maréchal’s despotism. On the pretext of maladministration she was brought back to the motherhouse in 1858 with the episcopal directive to “take the necessary steps so as not to harm anyone.” From this second removal until her death, she was kept from all administrative responsibility — including the deliberations of the general council, to which the elections of 1872 and 1878 had returned her. Assigned to the humblest tasks of the laundry and the ironing room, she led a life of total renunciation that ensured the growth of her Congregation. Here lies the paradox of an influence that others sought to neutralize: in the dim basement ironing rooms of the motherhouse, successive generations of novices received from the Foundress the example of a life of obedience, humility, and heroic charity. To a novice who one day asked why she, the Foundress, was kept at such modest duties, she replied with gentle simplicity: “The deeper a tree takes root in the ground, the greater its chances of growing and bearing fruit.”
Mother Marie-Anne’s bearing in the face of the injustices she suffered allows us to discover the evangelical meaning she always gave to the events of her life. Like Christ, consumed with zeal for the Father’s glory, she sought in all things only “the glory of God,” which she made the purpose of her community. “Making the good God known to young people who had not had the happiness of knowing him” was for her a privileged means of working for God’s glory. Stripped of her most legitimate rights, deprived even of her personal correspondence with her bishop, she surrendered everything without resistance, awaiting from God the resolution of all things, knowing that “in his Wisdom, he would know how to discern the true from the false and to reward each according to their works.”
Prevented by the authorities who succeeded her from being called “mother,” Mother Marie-Anne did not cling jealously to her title as Foundress; she accepted abasement instead — like Jesus, “her crucified Love” — so that her community might live. She did not, however, renounce her mission as spiritual mother of her Congregation; she offered herself to God “to expiate all the evil that had been done in the community,” and each day asked Saint Anne “for her spiritual daughters, the virtues necessary to Christian educators.”
Like every prophet entrusted with a mission of salvation for his own people, Mother Marie-Anne lived through persecution by forgiving without reserve; she was convinced that “there is more happiness in forgiving than in taking revenge.” This evangelical forgiveness was for her the guarantor of “peace of soul, which she regarded as the most precious good,” and she gave a final witness to it on her deathbed, asking the superior to summon Father Maréchal “for the edification of the sisters.”
Sensing the end drawing near, Mother Marie-Anne left to her daughters, as a spiritual testament, these words that well sum up her entire life: “Let the Eucharist and abandonment to the Will of God be your heaven on earth.” She then died peacefully at the motherhouse of Lachine on 2 February 1890, “happy to go to the good God” whom she had served all her life.