St. Marguerite Bourgeoys was a French missionary who educated native people and settlers in Montreal and Quebec—she is one of Canada’s first saints.

She was born in 1620 in France to a middle-class family. When she was twenty, Marguerite attended a procession on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. During the procession, she looked at a statue of Mary that seemed to be looking back at her with a living, loving gaze. Marguerite was profoundly touched by this event and dedicated her life to God by trying to emulate Mary in all she did.

A cloistered religious community of sisters, the Congregation of Notre Dame, lived in Marguerite’s hometown. They had an educational mission and ran a boarding school to teach girls within the cloister. To reach girls from poor families who could not attend the boarding school, the cloistered nuns sent women associated with their community through a “confraternity” out to village and city schools to teach the poorer families. Marguerite joined this confraternity and, over time, became the leader of the confraternity.

The governor of a colony in New France had family in Marguerite’s hometown and returned for a time to recruit workers and educators. The rough life of a New World colony could not support a cloister, but the women of the confraternity would be able to travel and engage colonists and native peoples. Thus, in 1653, Marguerite decided to travel to New France as a missionary.

Marguerite landed in Quebec and traveled to the countryside around Montreal. She was disappointed to find few children living there, due to high rates of infant mortality, but Marguerite set about working alongside the French settlers. Marguerite arranged for the construction of a new church and was given a stone barn in which she began the first public school in Montreal.

Marguerite slowly began to gather other young women to help with her work, and they assembled into a community. Non-cloistered religious sisters were a rare thing in the seventeenth-century Church, but Marguerite fought for an active status for her community so that they could continue to live among settlers and reach out to people of all walks of life, rather than depend upon people coming to them. Marguerite had to contend with a bishop intent on regularizing her community into a cloister, and even went back to France to get a letter from the king in her defense. Marguerite’s determination paid off and her Sisters of Notre Dame became known as “secular sisters.”

As the colony of New France grew, so did the educational needs of its people, and Marguerite and her community responded by building schools for both settlers and native people. They struggled with many obstacles—poverty, tensions with the native Iroquois, and a fire that burned their convent and killed two sisters—but Marguerite led her community with courage and faith in God’s providence.

In her old age, Marguerite turned to attention to a more contemplative life of prayer and writing of her autobiography. When a young sister in the community fell gravely ill, Marguerite prayed for God to exchange her own life for the sick sister’s. Within a few days, the young sister recovered, and Marguerite fell sick—she died soon afterward on January 12, 1700. The people of Montreal and New France had long recognized her holiness, but Marguerite was not formally canonized until 1982.

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys is represented in this stained glass window to the left that was installed in the chapel of the Stayer Center for Executive Education on Notre Dame’s campus; some of Marguerite’s relics are housed in the reliquary chapel in the Basilica.

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, who brought education to the poor of New France—pray for us!