Saint Louise de Marillac

Louise de Marillac was born on August 12, 1591. Her mother is unknown, and her father, Louis de Marillac, acknowledged her. After he remarried he placed her, still a small child, with the Dominican nuns of the royal monastery of Poissy, where an aunt of hers was a nun. When he died on July 25, 1604, her uncle Michel de Marillac became her guardian and moved her to a boarding school for girls. At about fifteen she asked to enter the Capuchin nuns, and the convent’s director refused her because of her poor health.

On February 5, 1613, in the church of Saint-Gervais in Paris, she married Antoine Le Gras, a squire and secretary to the queen, and their son Michel was born on October 18, 1613. Her husband fell ill in 1622, and she passed through a time of doubt. On Pentecost, June 4, 1623, in the church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, she received by her own account a light that ended her inner darkness and let her foresee a community whose members would come and go among the poor. Antoine Le Gras died on December 21, 1625. From that year Vincent de Paul, who lived near her new home, was her spiritual director.

In 1629, at Vincent’s request, she began to visit the Confraternities of Charity he had founded in the villages. Around 1630 a country girl, Marguerite Naseau, offered to help the Ladies of Charity in Paris, and other peasant women followed her; Marguerite died in February 1633. On November 29, 1633, Louise gathered four or five young village women in her house, in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, and that day is counted as the founding of the Company of the Daughters of Charity, which she directed for the rest of her life.

From 1641 she lived in the parish of Saint-Laurent, where the mother house of the Daughters of Charity then stood. She died in Paris on March 15, 1660, a few months before Vincent. She had asked to be buried at Saint-Lazare; she was laid in the chapel of the Visitation in the church of Saint-Laurent, under a wooden cross bearing the words Spes Unica, the monument she had asked for in her will.

Her body remained at Saint-Laurent for ninety-five years, until 1755, when it was taken to the mother house. During the Revolution her coffin was hidden, and in 1797 a woman named Deleau bought it back. After the Revolution the remains went to the new mother house in the rue du Vieux-Colombier and then, on June 29, 1815, to the rue du Bac, and in 1824 they were laid under the floor of the new chapel. Today her bones rest in a glass shrine over a side altar of that chapel, inside a figure whose face and hands are modeled in wax; the body is not incorrupt, and a stone in the central aisle marks her former grave. Pope Benedict XV beatified her on May 9, 1920, and Pope Pius XI canonized her on March 11, 1934.

On February 10, 1960, Pope John XXIII named her patroness of all who devote themselves to Christian social work. Her feast was long kept on March 15, the day of her death, which falls in Lent. By a decree of January 4, 2016, the Congregation for Divine Worship moved it in the Vincentian calendar to May 9, the anniversary of her beatification.

She is shown in the dress and veil of a widow of her time. In the chapel of the rue du Bac, a mosaic in one side aisle accompanies her shrine, matching the mosaic that surrounds the statue and relic of Saint Vincent de Paul in the other. At Saint-Laurent the wooden cross inscribed Spes Unica, “the only hope,” still marks the place of her first grave. Outside France, her statue stands among the founders of religious orders in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Patroness of all who devote themselves to Christian social work, named by Pope John XXIII on February 10, 1960.

• Paris, 140 rue du BacThe chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, at the mother house of the Daughters of Charity, where her remains rest in a glass shrine over a side altar.
• Paris, Saint-LaurentThe church on the boulevard de Magenta, her parish from 1641, where a wooden cross inscribed Spes Unica marks her first grave in the chapel of the Visitation.
• Paris, Saint-Nicolas-des-ChampsThe church where, by her own account, she received the light of Pentecost on June 4, 1623.
• Paris, Saint-GervaisThe church where she married Antoine Le Gras on February 5, 1613.

• Via CaritatisThe Way of Charity, seven days
• Via ImmaculataeThe Way of the Immaculate, ten days