Sisters celebrate 350 years

This is an excerpt from a homily by Archbishop J. Michael Miller given at St. Mary’s Church Aug. 11 for the 350th anniversary celebrations of the Sisters of the Child Jesus.

This evening we are celebrating a great gift to the Church: the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Sisters of the Child Jesus. The date is special, for it marks a courageous step taken by a young woman of 21 in France of 1667. This is not the date of the recognition of a rule or constitutions, the usual way to mark anniversaries of religious congregations, but the commemoration of a simple act of teaching catechism to poor women in a hospital.

From their beginning, the Sisters of the Child Jesus have been pioneers, a little out of the ordinary, creative and faithful women. From their founding, they discerned by living among their brothers and sisters in the world how to bear witness to the presence of God’s love in their community life and how to effectively draw others to the knowledge and love of the Lord.

Anne-Marie Martel, whose birthday, coincidentally, was on Aug. 11, was a lay woman, born to an affluent family in Le Puy, France. She was intensely given to prayer and union with Jesus, and she saw her vocation as bringing the knowledge and love of God to the “peripheries” of her day.

This is the charism, the gift she received from the Holy Spirit, which quickly led to other women joining her apostolic endeavour.  Anne-Marie had no sense of being a “mother foundress” in the traditional sense of starting a new religious community, but she attracted other dedicated women, inspired by her love for the poor. They gathered around her and shared a simple apostolic life.

But she was more than a mere instructor of the marginalized.  For example, the young women who came to the city to work in the growing lace-making industry found in her not only a font of Christian doctrine but also a spirit of justice.  She worked to ensure that they were not exploited and that they received a just price for their work.

Long before Pope Francis rallied the Church to go out to the peripheries of our world, to the margins of society, the women who established a community only after Anne-Marie’s death dressed the wounds of the suffering Christ in their brothers and sisters who were poor, sick, uneducated, marginalized by discrimination, treated unjustly, in need of counselling and comfort, and left alone. This is what the Sisters continue to do today. With their particular gifts and talents and through her prayer and witness, they have been – and are – the presence of God in her world.

Of course I am especially grateful for the Sisters’ contribution to the Church in British Columbia, above all in the Archdiocese of Vancouver. Bishop Pierre-Paul Durieu became acquainted with the SEJs because his niece became a member of the Congregation and he often visited her in Le Puys. He requested that they help with the missions in B.C., and in 1896 they sent four sisters. They found it rough-going at first in the interior but were eventually joined by more sisters. At the close of the 19th century they were already established at St. Paul’s Mission in what is now North Vancouver, where they have remained for well over a century. Slowly they expanded to schools in Sechelt and Maillardville and elsewhere.

Of particular note is the Sisters’ love for the First Nations people with whom they laboured from the beginning, each learning so much from the other. It was collaborative ministry long before the term became fashionable. Indeed, working alongside others and not just for them is characteristic of the Sisters of the Child Jesus. Perhaps they learned this trait of respect and kindliness from Anne-Marie Martel who was known for “her singular gentleness” – a virtue which, apparently, was hard-won.

Tonight we are not just grateful for your ministries but also for your religious consecration, which tells something about God whose love is unconditional and without reserve. You are, like Christ, “signs of contradiction” – “signs that are opposed” (Lk 2:34) by the world.  Your very existence as consecrated exclusively to the Lord and his Church is a provocation. You are, then, provocateurs, not in the sense of being self-styled prophets who call attention to themselves, but by being powerful reminders to all the baptized of the fundamental demands of the Gospel. To be too cosy or too middle-class or to fit in too easily is to miss the boat about the witness value of your consecration.

We thank you Sisters, and above all we thank the good Lord, because for 350 years you have been the salt of the earth and light to our world, especially here in B.C. and the Archdiocese of Vancouver. No one expressed our sentiments this evening better than the Apostle Paul who wrote words that are those of all of us: “I give thanks to my God always for you, because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus.”