Feast day: March 15
St. Louise de Marillac
A French widow who, with St. Vincent de Paul, founded the Daughters of Charity — sisters who left the cloister to nurse the sick and feed the poor in the streets.
Louise de Marillac was born in 1591 into a distinguished French family, though under the shadow of illegitimacy, and was carefully educated but denied the religious life she at first desired. She married Antoine Le Gras, an official at the royal court, and for some years lived the life of a devoted wife and mother — until his long illness and death left her a widow, prone to anxiety and scruples, searching for the way God meant her to serve.
She found it through her spiritual director, St. Vincent de Paul. Vincent had organized noblewomen into 'Confraternities of Charity' to aid the sick poor, but the ladies often could not do the hardest and humblest work themselves. In Louise he found the leader he needed, and he sent her out to visit, inspect, and strengthen these charities across France, drawing on her intelligence, her thoroughness, and her deep compassion.
Together, in 1633, they founded the Daughters of Charity — and in doing so quietly revolutionized the religious life of women. Louise's sisters were not enclosed nuns behind convent walls but went out into the world to serve, nursing the sick in their homes and in hospitals, teaching poor children, caring for foundlings, prisoners, and the aged, with, as Vincent said, 'the streets for their cloister.'
Louise trained and formed these women, wrote their rules, tended the sick alongside them, and governed the rapidly growing community with wisdom and tireless energy until her death in 1660, only months before Vincent's own. Canonized in 1934 and named a patron of social workers, she stands at the origin of much of modern organized charity and nursing.
She helped invent modern social work: her sisters served not behind convent walls but in homes, hospitals, and slums, 'the streets their cloister.'
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09133b.htm
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