“I offered myself with all my heart to do God’s will.”

Marguerite was born in 1620 in Troyes, France, located along the Seine River not too far from Paris. She was the 7th of 13 children.

She did not show interest during her childhood for the religious life but at the age of 15 she decided to join the Society affiliated with the Congregation of Notre-Dame which had been recently founded. The Society was set up to help and teach the poor who were outside of the cloister or confines of the Congregation.

When she was 32, the Governor of the French settlement in Ville-Marie, future Montreal, Canada, visited his sister who was the director of the Society. He invited Marguerite to come to Ville-Marie to start a school. The following year she accepted the assignment to set up a mission in New France and travel with about 100 other colonists.

In 1657, she organized the formation of a work party to build Ville-Marie’s first permanent church and in 1658 the town’s founder provided her with a vacant stable to serve as a schoolhouse for students. She had established the first public schooling in Montreal.

She found that few children survived to school age and helped Jeanne Mance, who ran the hospital, to change this tragedy.

She survived many threats in the 26 years she lived in Canada, living through Iroquois attacks, a fire that destroyed her village, and plagues on ships that she took back and forth to France, but nothing threatened her more than the words from her bishop who said she had to join her cloistered Congregation of Notre Dame because they were not allowed to teach outside of their confines. The small group of women began to follow a religious way of life and they had set up schools all over the territory.

They sought official recognition and legitimacy from the Crown and the Church setting up meetings with the King and Bishop. With the Society’s work, she convinced the Bishop to create a Congregation out of their Society as an active teaching order, the 1st of its kind for women and she lived to see the triumph when their Rule was made official in 1698.

2 years later she offered her life to God in order to save that of a younger member of the Congregation who had fallen ill. After intense prayer, the young nun was cured and Marguerite fell terribly ill and died on January 2, 1700.

She was canonized in 1982 by Saint Pope John Paul II.

She is the patron saint of loss of parents, mother, father.

Her feast day is January 12.

For God’s Glory.