Feast Day of SAINT MARGARET D'YOUVILLE

SAINT MARGARET D'YOUVILLED'YOUVILLE
Foundress of the Sisters of Charity, called Grey Nuns
(1701-1771)

The oldest of six children, at seven years of age Mary Margaret Dufrost, born at Varennes near Montreal, had already lost her courageous soldier-father. After receiving only two years of excellent education in Quebec City with the Ursuline nuns, she was obliged to return to Varennes before her twelfth birthday, to assist her mother to bring up her five younger brothers and sisters. The Sisters had foreseen the heavy responsibilities which would come upon her, and under their tutelage, as they later testified, she had “redoubled her activity and application to all her duties.” By means of a subsidy granted by the king of France to the families of his deceased military officers, the little family was able to remain together.

One day, some sixty years later, Mother Margaret d’Youville, Foundress of a Congregation of Sisters of Charity, would be known to the people of Quebec as “the Providence of Montreal.” It became proverbial among the Church’s authorities, even before she died, when there was a charitable work to do, to “ask the Grey Nuns; they never refuse a mission.” This was indeed an honorable reputation; but in 1730 the twenty-six year-old widow of Francis d’Youville, seigneur of La Découverte, alone with two sons to bring up, could not have imagined such honor, nor what Providence was holding in store for her already strong and experienced charity.