Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys

Marguerite Bourgeoys was born at Troyes, in Champagne, on Good Friday, April 17, 1620, and baptized the same day in her parish church of Saint-Jean-au-Marché. She was the sixth of twelve children of Abraham Bourgeoys, a master candle maker and a coiner at the Troyes mint, and Guillemette Garnier, and she lost her mother at nineteen. The family house stood at 19 bis Grande Rue, on the old Belle-Croix square, now the place Alexandre-Israël; it was demolished in 1977.

During the procession of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7, 1640, she was moved by a stone statue of the Virgin and resolved to give herself to God. She joined the extern congregation of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Troyes, a group of young women who taught children in the poor districts of the town. It was directed by Louise de Chomedey, sister of Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, who founded Ville-Marie, the future Montreal, in 1642. At twenty-three she took a vow of chastity.

When Maisonneuve passed through Troyes in 1652, he accepted her offer to go to Ville-Marie as a teacher. She left Troyes in February 1653, landed at Quebec on September 22 and reached Montreal on November 16, 1653. In 1657 she began, with the help of the settlers, the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, and on April 30, 1658, she received her first pupils in a stable that Maisonneuve had given her. She also met and housed the young women sent by the king to marry in the colony, the filles du roi, and prepared them for married life.

She returned to France three times, in 1658, about 1670 and about 1680, to seek companions and support, and from the first voyage she brought back three young women. Louis XIV granted letters patent to her community in May 1671, and the bishop of Quebec, François de Laval, approved it in 1676. On July 1, 1698, in the presence of Bishop Saint-Vallier, she and her companions made simple vows and the Congregation was canonically established; she took the name Sister of the Blessed Sacrament. She died at Montreal on January 12, 1700.

She was buried the next day; the parish of Ville-Marie kept her body, and the Congregation her heart. Today her remains rest in the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours in Old Montreal, rebuilt from 1771 to 1773 after a fire in 1754, and her heart is at the mother house of the Congregation of Notre-Dame. Pope Pius XII beatified her on November 12, 1950, and Pope John Paul II canonized her in Saint Peter’s Basilica on October 31, 1982; she was the first woman saint of the Church in Canada. Her feast is kept in Canada on January 12. The Congregation of Notre-Dame, which she founded, works today in the United States as well as in Canada.

According to the Congregation, the only true likeness of her is the portrait that Pierre Le Ber painted shortly after her death in 1700. It was altered several times between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century, once by a complete overpainting that softened her features, and a restoration in 1963 and 1964 uncovered the original painting. In France a stained-glass window dedicated to her, designed by the master glassmaker Jean-François Bordenave and given by the New France Memorial Committee, was blessed on October 28, 2017, in the church of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul at Hiers-Brouage, near La Rochelle.

• Troyes, Saint-Jean-au-MarchéThe church of her baptism on April 17, 1620, on the rue Mignard; free, open Wednesday to Friday and on Sunday afternoons through the winter of 2026–2027.
• Troyes, place Alexandre-IsraëlThe square, once called Belle-Croix, where her family’s house stood until it was demolished in 1977.
• Hiers-BrouageThe church of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, with the stained-glass window dedicated to her in 2017.