Saint Marie-Eugénie Milleret

Anne-Eugénie Milleret de Brou was born at Metz in August 1817; her biographers give the date as August 25 or August 26. Her father, a banker and liberal politician and a follower of Voltaire, did not practice the faith, while her mother took the children to help poor families. She made her First Communion at Christmas 1829, and at her canonization Benedict XVI said that “her First Holy Communion was an important moment, even if she was unaware of it at the time.” In 1830 her father’s banks failed and the family château was sold. Her parents separated, and she went to Paris with her mother, who died of cholera in 1832.

In Lent 1836 she heard the conferences of Father Henri Lacordaire at Notre-Dame de Paris. In a letter to Father Picard of November 8, 1862, she wrote: “The first movement of my vocation came to me at Notre-Dame during the conferences of 1836.” Father Théodore Combalot, who met her in confession, urged her to found a congregation for the education of girls. She stayed for a time with the Benedictines of the Blessed Sacrament and made a short novitiate with the nuns of the Visitation. On April 30, 1839, she and her first companions settled in a small apartment on the rue Férou, near Saint-Sulpice, and this was the foundation of the Religious of the Assumption.

An Irishwoman, Kate O’Neill, joined the community in 1839 and, as Mother Thérèse-Emmanuel, is counted as its co-foundress; Marie-Eugénie called her “half of myself.” Father Emmanuel d’Alzon was her spiritual director from 1841, and with her encouragement he founded the Augustinians of the Assumption in 1845. She made her perpetual profession on December 25, 1844, before Archbishop Affre of Paris. In 1857 the mother house moved to Auteuil, in the west of Paris. The congregation was made an institute of pontifical right in 1867, and Leo XIII approved its Constitutions in 1888.

She resigned as superior general in 1894, after fifty-five years at the head of the congregation, and a stroke in the last year of her life left her unable to speak. She received Communion for the last time on March 9, 1898, and died at the mother house in Auteuil on March 10, 1898, at the age of eighty.

She was buried at the mother house, 17 rue de l’Assomption, where her tomb is kept. Saint John XXIII declared her Venerable on June 21, 1961. Saint Paul VI beatified her in Rome on February 9, 1975, and Benedict XVI canonized her in Saint Peter’s Square on June 3, 2007. The miracle approved for the canonization was the healing of Risa Bondoc, a Filipino girl born with a rare defect of the brain, whose adoptive mother had laid her on the tomb at Auteuil and asked for the foundress’s prayers. The archdiocese of Paris keeps her optional memorial on March 10, and the city has named the avenue Anne-Eugénie-Milleret-de-Brou after her, in the sixteenth arrondissement, on the former grounds of the convent. On December 8, 2024, a relic of her was sealed into the new main altar of Notre-Dame de Paris, with relics of Saint Madeleine-Sophie Barat, Saint Catherine Labouré, Saint Charles de Foucauld and Blessed Vladimir Ghika. The Religious of the Assumption are present today in thirty-three countries, including the United States.

Her likeness is known chiefly from photographs taken in her later years, among them one dated about 1880. A portrait of her is kept at her shrine in the chapel of the mother house at Auteuil.

• Paris, mother house of the Assumption, AuteuilHer tomb, at 17 rue de l’Assomption in the sixteenth arrondissement (Métro Ranelagh), in the house where she died in 1898; it is a convent, and the sisters should be contacted before a visit.
• Paris, Cathedral of Notre-DameThe cathedral where her vocation began in Lent 1836, with a relic of her sealed in the main altar since December 8, 2024.