Feast day: January 12

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys

Virgin, Foundress · 1620–1700

Patron of Against poverty, Canada

A Frenchwoman who sailed to frontier Montreal and opened its first school, teaching settler and Native children alike and founding a community of teaching sisters.

Marguerite Bourgeoys was born in 1620 at Troyes in France, the daughter of a candlemaker, and as a young woman, drawn to serve God by teaching the poor, she joined an uncloistered association of women who ran free schools. When the governor of the struggling French colony at Montreal — then a tiny, dangerous frontier outpost called Ville-Marie — came seeking a teacher for its children, Marguerite volunteered to cross the ocean to the New World.

She arrived in 1653 to find a settlement so small and so beset by hardship that there were as yet almost no children old enough to teach. She waited, helping the colonists in every way, until in 1658 she opened Montreal's first school in a converted stable — a humble beginning for what would become a great work of education in Canada.

She taught settler and Native children alike, and crossed back to France several times, at great risk, to recruit companions and to gain approval for a new kind of religious community: the Congregation of Notre Dame, sisters who, like herself, would live not enclosed behind convent walls but out among the people, traveling to teach in the scattered settlements of the colony. She also welcomed and cared for the 'King's Daughters,' the young women sent from France to marry and build families in New France.

Through fires, poverty, and the loss of companions, she built up her congregation and its schools across the colony, laying the foundations of education for girls in Canada. She died at Montreal in 1700, and in 1982 became the first woman saint of Canada — honored as a pioneer of the Church and of education in the New World.

She crossed the Atlantic seven times for her colony's schools and is honored as Canada's first woman saint.