Saint Mary Euphrasia Pelletier

Rose-Virginie Pelletier was born on July 31, 1796, at Noirmoutier-en-l’Île, on the island of Noirmoutier off the coast of the Vendée, where her parents, Julien and Anne Pelletier, had taken refuge from the violence of the Revolution. She was their eighth child. Her father, a physician, died when she was ten. In 1810 her mother placed her in a boarding school at Tours, and her mother died in 1813.

On October 20, 1814, she entered the monastery of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge at Tours, an order founded by Saint John Eudes in 1641. She received the habit and the name Mary of Saint Euphrasia on September 6, 1815, and made her vows in 1817. In 1825, at twenty-nine, she was elected superior, with a dispensation because she was under the required age, and at Tours she founded a contemplative community, the Magdalens, today the Contemplative Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

In 1828 the bishop of Angers received a bequest of 30,000 francs for a refuge and asked her to found it. She opened the house on July 31, 1829, in the former Tournemine calico factory, under the patronage of the Good Shepherd, to receive and support women in difficulty, and became its superior in 1831. Foundations followed at Le Mans, Poitiers, Grenoble and Metz, and later in Italy, Belgium, Germany and England. To keep the houses united under one central government, she turned to Rome, and in April 1835 Pope Gregory XVI approved the generalate of Angers and with it the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, whose mother house was Angers.

In 1842, at the invitation of Bishop Joseph Flaget, she sent five young sisters to Louisville, Kentucky, the first Good Shepherd Sisters in North America. She led the congregation for thirty-three years and died of cancer at Angers on April 24, 1868, at the age of seventy-one, leaving some 3,000 sisters in 110 houses.

Pope Leo XIII declared her venerable on December 11, 1897, Pope Pius XI beatified her on April 30, 1933, and Pope Pius XII canonized her on May 2, 1940. At her own wish she had been buried in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception, on the grounds of the mother house, and her relics are still venerated there. The generalate moved to Rome in 1966, and Angers kept the title of mother house; since 1998 the main building has served as a guest house and conference center, the Hostellerie Bon Pasteur. Her feast is kept on April 24. The congregation is present today in more than seventy countries.

At Angers her wax figure lies in a reliquary that was first placed under the high altar and has stood since 1997 in a side chapel of the modern chapel. A nineteenth-century portrait of her by an unknown painter survives, and a statue of her as a founder stands in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The Musée du Bon Pasteur presents the history of the congregation on three floors, with the former dormitory devoted to the daily life of the sisters.

• Angers, mother house of the Good ShepherdThe house she founded in 1829, where she was buried at her own wish and where her relics are venerated in the chapels on its grounds.
• Angers, Musée du Bon PasteurAt 18 rue Marie-Euphrasie-Pelletier, entered through the Hostellerie, open on a few afternoons a week; the Angers tourist office gives the current days.
• Noirmoutier-en-l’ÎleThe island town where she was born on July 31, 1796.