Days in the Life of Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys
Celebrating the anniversary of the canonization of Marguerite Bourgeoys on October 31, 1982
April 17, 1620
Born in Troyes, France.
October 7, 1640
“I felt God touched me” – begins searching for a way to respond.
November 16, 1653
She arrives in Ville-Marie after three months on the leaky ship St. Nicolas.
Birth of a Nation
This film is a remake of an early telling of the story of Nat Turner, a slave who led a rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Turner is literate, having learned to read from the pages of the Bible. He was forced to use his preaching skill to keep the slaves “in line” and productive for their owners. Nat struggles with this task, because he knows, instinctively, the Scriptures are really about freedom. We see suffering, but also one man’s passionate conviction he would prefer death to a continued life of slavery. The story is a hard one, but it’s history. Helps us understand the current racism and revenge that flourish even now.
Marguerite Bourgeoys – a short biography
On October 31st, we celebrate the anniversary of canonization of Marguerite Bourgeoys.
Educator of Montreal
Marguerite Bourgeoys, a native of Troyes, France, came to Ville-Marie in 1653. The city that we now know as Montreal came into existence through the desire of a group of devout men and women in seventeenth-century France to share with the native people of the New World what they regarded as their most precious possession: their Christian faith. They hoped to achieve this goal through the establishment of a settlement on the island of Montreal in the colony of New France. The foundation was intended to embody the Christian ideal described in the Acts of the Apostles in such a way as to attract the Amerindians just as the communities of early Christians had drawn their first converts in the Mediterranean world of the first century.
Marguerite Bourgeoys's arrival eleven years after the initial foundation was to fulfill part of the original design for the colony, which included a plan to provide for the education of its children. She came with the recruitment known as the “hundred men” (« La grande recrue »), who were to prevent that first foundation from abandonment or extinction, the alternatives facing Ville-Marie by 1653. On the voyage between France and Canada, during which she had cared for the sick and consoled the dying, the prospective settlers with whom she journeyed had already begun to address her as “Sister.” From this beginning until her death in 1700, she was totally dedicated to the welfare of the people of Montreal.
