Both the United States and Canada begin the new year honoring several of their native sons and daughters. For the United States, it’s Sts. Elizabeth Ann Seton and John Neumann. For Canada, it’s Brother André Bessette and Marguerite Bourgeoys.

Canada’s first female saint, Marguerite Bourgeoys, was born in 1620 and died in 1700. That means she was born the same year the Pilgrims set sail for America and died three-quarters of a century before American independence. That she was instrumental in building up the Church in then-New France (now Canada) reminds us that a lot more was going on in North America (especially its French and Spanish sectors) than a narrow focus on the “13 colonies” might suggest.

She came from Troyes, a city about 100 miles southeast of Paris. At 20, during a procession on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, she felt an urge to serve the Church, though the process of that discernment would take some time. It eventually found itself in education.

While perhaps this is unsurprising to us, what was surprising about it was the way Marguerite wanted to approach it. That nuns educated children (in her case specifically, girls) was not surprising. But that education usually occurred in cloistered communities, i.e., within convent walls. The sisters in Troyes did, however, have what they called a “Sodality,” a structure by which externs taught poor girls whose parents could not afford to put them for room and board as well as education in a convent. That non-cloistered environment appealed to Marguerite, who would replicate it later in her life.

Canada’s French history was in its infancy. Champlain had only founded Québec City in 1608. In 1642, she first learned of the efforts to found what would today be called Montréal; a decade later, she would be on her way there, responding to a call to educate French and Indian children there. Convinced that Our Lady assured her, “Go, I will not forsake you,” she went in 1653, arriving in the settlement on the St. Lawrence River nine months after leaving Troyes. She is counted among the city’s founders.

For the next six years, she labored to educate children in the stable the governor gave her for a venue, building up the primitive educational system in the new colony. By 1658, other women were coming to join her community, to dedicate themselves to missionary education in imitation of Our Lady amid hardship and poverty. By 1659, new women were coming from France to settle in the city and establish homes, recommended by church and state, and she became their help, establishing a school system and social safety net. It’s even claimed she and her sisters were quasi-matchmakers, ensuring that the girls in their charge would only be introduced to good Catholic men for marriage.

The nucleus of women who began joining Bourgeoys’ uncloistered institute would eventually obtain civil and ecclesiastical approval, by royal charter in 1671, by the Bishop of Québec in 1676, and with their own constitutions in 1698. Bourgeoys’ institute would become the Congrégation de Notre Dame, one of the principal early female religious congregations in Canada.

Bourgeoys would die two years later, in January 1700. Tradition had it that she offered in prayer for life for that of a sick younger sister. It’s also said that a local priest, writing the day after Marguerite died, opined that “if saints were canonized as in the past by the voice of the people and of the clergy, tomorrow we would be saying the Mass of St. Marguerite of Canada.” In the Church’s formal processes, she had to wait to be beatified in 1950 and canonized in 1982. The two miracles attributed to her involved the inexplicable overnight cures of two men threatened with amputation from spreading gangrene.

Just as I quoted a contemporary on the opinion of her holiness, I want to depict her by a contemporary. Pierre Le Ber (1669-1707) was a Canadian-born painter who painted this portrait of Marguerite in 1700, i.e., the year of her death. While primitive, especially by comparative artistic standards in France, it was a locally painted portrait by an on-site artist who must have known her in life. (The painting here has been restored.) It depicts Marguerite in prayer, dressed in her habit and wearing a crucifix, expressing both her faith in Christ and her taking up her own cross amidst the hardships of an outpost colony far from her native country. The limited color palette likewise emphasizes the stark conditions under which the saint labored in faith.

For more reading, see here and here. For the Vatican painting used for her canonization, see here.