Saint Madeleine-Sophie Barat

Madeleine-Sophie Barat was born at Joigny, in Burgundy, on December 12, 1779, two months early, after a fire nearby had frightened her mother, and she was baptized at once in the church of Saint-Thibault, a few yards from the family home. Her father, Jacques Barat, was a cooper and vine grower. Her elder brother Louis gave her an education rare for a girl of her time, in Latin, Greek, history, science, Spanish and Italian, and in 1795 he took her to Paris, where she went on to study the Fathers of the Church and Scripture.

In Paris she met Father Joseph Varin, who wished to found a congregation of women devoted to the Sacred Heart and to the education of girls. On November 21, 1800, she and three companions consecrated themselves to God, and the Society of the Sacred Heart dates its foundation from that day. Because devotion to the Sacred Heart was then forbidden, the community at first went by another name. Its first school opened at Amiens in September 1801. She was named superior in December 1802, at twenty-three, and elected superior general in January 1806.

The Society spread quickly in France and abroad. In December 1804 she went to Grenoble and received Philippine Duchesne and her companions at the old Visitation monastery of Sainte-Marie d’en-Haut, and in 1818 she sent Philippine with four other religious to Louisiana. Rome approved the Society in 1826, under Pope Leo XII. In Paris its house moved in 1820 to the Hôtel Biron, 77 rue de Varenne, now the Musée Rodin, and a new mother house opened on the boulevard des Invalides in 1859.

She died at that mother house on May 25, 1865, Ascension Day, at the age of eighty-five. By then the Society counted about one hundred communities, and it had grown to over 3,500 members during her years as superior general. She was buried in the cemetery at Conflans, near Paris, on May 29, 1865.

When her coffin was opened for the cause on October 2, 1893, her body was found incorrupt, and it was laid in the crypt of the chapel at Conflans. In 1904, when the religious congregations were expelled from France, it was taken to Belgium, to the church of Saint-Pierre at Jette, near Brussels; in 1909 it was placed in a reliquary, which went in 1998 to the Society’s community chapel in Brussels. Pope Pius X beatified her on May 24, 1908, and Pope Pius XI canonized her on May 24, 1925. On June 19, 2009, the feast of the Sacred Heart, the reliquary returned to Paris, to the chapel of the Sacred Heart in the church of Saint-François-Xavier, across from the house where she died, and her body rests there today.

Her optional memorial is kept on May 24 in the archdiocese of Paris, and the Society of the Sacred Heart keeps her feast on May 25. On December 8, 2024, a relic of her was placed in the high altar of Notre-Dame de Paris at the cathedral’s reopening. The Society reached North America with Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne in 1818 and works today in the United States and Canada, where its Academy of the Sacred Heart at St. Charles, Missouri, keeps Philippine’s shrine.

Her reliquary at Saint-François-Xavier is a neo-Gothic shrine of gilded bronze made at Ghent in 1909 by Bourdon; a mask of her face was made in 1908, while the reliquary was being prepared. A portrait found in Rome in 1992 is believed to date from before her beatification, and a photograph of her on her deathbed survives. A statue of her by Enrico Quattrini, made in 1934, stands in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

• Paris, Saint-François-XavierThe church on the place du Président-Mithouard, where her body has rested in its reliquary in the chapel of the Sacred Heart since 2009.
• Paris, Notre-Dame CathedralA relic of her has been sealed in the high altar since the reopening of December 8, 2024.
• Paris, boulevard des InvalidesThe former mother house where she died in 1865, now the Lycée Victor-Duruy, opposite Saint-François-Xavier.
• Joigny, Centre Sophie BaratHer sixteenth-century birth house and its gardens at 11 rue Davier, visited by appointment made at least three days ahead; admission by free-will offering.
• Joigny, Saint-ThibaultThe church of her baptism, a few yards from her birth house.