Saint Louise de Marillac

She was more than Saint Vincent de Paul’s capable co-worker. She was the mother, the teacher and the heart of the Daughters of Charity, the first sisters in the history of the Church who dared to leave the cloister to carry love into muddy streets, foul-smelling hospitals and tumbledown huts.

As she grew up, Louise was sent as a boarder to the Royal Monastery of Saint-Louis at Poissy, run by Dominican nuns. There she received a thorough education in philosophy, literature, painting and theology. The years spent within the sound of the nuns’ chant planted in her the wish to give her whole life to God as a Capuchin nun, among the sisters known as the Daughters of the Passion.

In 1604 her father died; Louise was only thirteen. Left without her one support, she was moved to a modest boarding house in Paris, where she learned thrift and housekeeping and got a taste of how uncertain life can be.

In 1613, in a marriage arranged by her family, Louise married Antoine Le Gras, a hardworking secretary at the royal court. They had one son, Michel. Louise devoted herself to her husband and child and to the duties of a noblewoman, but she was still torn by anxiety and guilt over the call to religious life she had once felt.

God made three things clear to her:

• she would stay to care for her husband until the day he died;
• afterwards, she would make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience;
• and she would be in a small community devoted to serving others, a place with no convent walls, going about freely to care for the poorest of the poor.

In 1625 Antoine died peacefully, nursed to the end by his wife. Widowed at thirty-four, Louise placed her life under the guidance of a priest who looked plain and countrified but burned with the fire of charity: Father Vincent de Paul.

Despite her poor health, Louise de Marillac climbed into jolting carriages and made her way to one remote village after another. She met with the members, taught them how to care for the sick and keep accounts, checked the stores of medicine, and made peace where there were quarrels.

These journeys drew her out of the shell of her own insecurity. She saw with her own eyes the extreme poverty of the peasants and the lack of schooling for girls, and she saw a great gap: the noble ladies of the Confraternities, generous as they were, could not themselves do the heavy, dirty work of changing bandages and washing the sick who were covered in sores.

There had to be people who would freely give their whole lives to doing those humble tasks directly, with all their love.

Louise de Marillac was the mother and teacher who trained and formed these country girls herself. She taught them to read, to prepare medicines and bandage wounds, and above all to see Christ Himself in the poor.

Under the spiritual guidance of Father Vincent de Paul and the gifted organizing hand of Mother Louise, the Daughters of Charity brought about a revolution in religious life. They were not shut behind convent grilles; they wore a coarse gray habit and the plain white winged headdress of French country girls of the day. They went everywhere: to the great hospitals of Angers and Nantes, to leper houses, to battlefields to nurse the wounded, and to the dungeons where convicts waited to be sent to the galleys.

Above all, Louise’s mother’s heart ached for the hundreds of newborns abandoned in the streets of Paris every year. With Father Vincent she founded a home for abandoned infants. With her own hands she bathed, warmed and held the babies left out on snowy winter nights, found trustworthy wet nurses, and saw to their schooling as they grew.

Her only son Michel was an open wound in her heart: he left his studies unfinished, dropped out of the seminary and drifted, and she wept silently through many sleepless nights. Father Vincent de Paul wrote to her again and again, urging her to entrust her son to God and not to let family worries paralyze her faith.

Only in 1650, when Michel married and gave her a granddaughter, did Louise find peace. The pain of raising a difficult child made her endlessly understanding toward the poor mothers and broken families she met every day.

During the years of the Fronde, the civil war that ravaged France, when Paris sank into hunger and chaos, Mother Louise’s house became the center of relief work. Though her body was broken by illness and constant fevers, she worked day and night to find flour and soup for thousands of refugees.

Before she closed her eyes, Mother Louise de Marillac left these last words to the Daughters of Charity kneeling around her bed:

“Always be united and love one another with all your hearts... Be faithful to your calling to serve the poor... Always pray to Our Lady, the only Mother of the Company!”

Pope Benedict XV beatified her in 1920, and on March 11, 1934, Pope Pius XI canonized Louise de Marillac. In 1960 Pope John XXIII proclaimed her patron of all Christian social workers. The Church celebrates her on May 9 each year, formerly on March 15. Her remains rest today inside a wax figure in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal on the Rue du Bac in Paris. The same chapel keeps the heart of Saint Vincent de Paul and the incorrupt body of Saint Catherine Labouré, to whom Our Lady appeared there in 1830; it is one of the most visited places of pilgrimage in Paris, with more than two million visitors a year.

In Vietnam, the winged headdress and simple blue habit of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul are a familiar sight in leper villages, orphanages, centers for people with disabilities and hospitals.