St. Marguerite d'Youville

Month of Saints - Day 22

Today, we will head to our Northern neighbor.  Saint Marguerite d'Youville was the first native born Canadian to be canonized as a Saint.

Marguerite was born in Varennes, Quebec, in 1701.  Her father died when she was seven and, as the oldest of seven children, she helped to raise her siblings. She attended school for the first time when she entered the Ursuline Sisters Convent School in Quebec at the age of eleven.

At twenty, she married a prosperous businessman. Soon she discovered that her husband's business success consisted of selling liquor illegally to Indians.  He also had political ties from bribing the governor to overlook the illegal sales. Between this and an overbearing mother-in-law, this was not a happy marriage for Marguerite. 

After eight years of marriage, Marguerite was left a widow with two small sons - her four other children died before the age of the two. She opened up a little shop in Montreal where she sold handmade clothes and other accoutrements for the home.  She was able to support herself and her boys, educate the boys (both of whom would become priests) and pay off her husband's substantial debts.

As early as 1730 she began doing volunteer work as a member of the Confraternity of the Holy Family. She gave her time and talent by mending clothes and cleaning rooms at the local hospital. She also took the poor into her home. Three women joined her in this ministry and on December 31, 1737, they consecrated themselves to God to serve the poor.  This was considered the founding of the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, known as the "Grey Nuns."

While these women dedicated their lives to serving the poor, some people wondered where they got the money to provide for these unsavory characters.  They wondered if she were still operating the liquor business that her husband had begun. People mocked the sisters by calling them, "les soeurs grises", playing on the word "grise" double meaning: grey and tipsy. Seventeen years later in designing the order's simple habits, Marguerite accepted the name given to the sisters and designed a gray religious habit.

By 1744 the association had become a religious order with a rule and a formal community. In 1747 they were granted a charter to operate the General Hospital of Montreal, which by that time was in ruins and heavily in debt. Marguerite and her fellow workers brought the hospital back into financial security, but the hospital was destroyed by fire in 1765. The order rebuilt the hospital soon after. Five years later, Marguerite suffered a stroke and died just before Christmas.  Her feast day is April 11.