Saint Louise de Marillac: a woman guided by the Holy Spirit. Foundress[1]
The challenge for the sons and daughters of St Vincent and St Louise, heirs of the charism that flows from the Holy Spirit through them, is to return again and again to that source in order to rediscover in them, people guided by the Holy Spirit, their qualities as founders.
Fabio Ciardi, in his work “Founders, men of the spirit: for a theology of the founder’s charism”, establishes four dimensions in which the genuine character of a charism is manifested: pneumatic, Christological-evangelical, ecclesial and fruitfulness. In this paper we want to present how these dimensions are manifested in the life and work of St. Louise de Marillac, considering the context of the 400th anniversary of the illumination of Pentecost.
Pneumatic dimension
The first thing Ciardi stresses is that “the founder is first of all a person raised up and moved by God through his Spirit” (Fabio, CIARDI, Founders, men of the spirit: for a theology of the founder’s charism. Madrid, Paulines, 1983, 352-357). Three moments can be identified in this pneumatic dimension:
a) Illuminative experiences: These are situations in which the founder is formed and led by the Spirit of God. In the life of Louise we can locate one of these experiences on June 4, 1623, the day of Pentecost.
She testifies in her writings that on that day her spirit was enlightened and she received great consolation and strength to remain at her husband’s side; she also opened herself to the grace of waiting with confidence for “the promises of God”: to be able to serve her neighbour in community. (Cf. W 5-7). This fact opens up in Luisa’s life a process of discernment based on the interior freedom she is able to experience, and is therefore an important milestone in her process of spiritual maturity.
Another enlightening experience was when in 1629 she was sent to visit the Confraternities of Charity. In that experience she went out of herself and in contact with the realities of the poor she observed the services provided and the challenges they faced. She became an organiser. Observing the difficulties of the Confraternities in the tasks entrusted to them, she began to dream of optimising the service. This time of generous dedication to the service of the poor forged in Louise a lucidity and creativity in the organisation of charity.
b) Propaedeutic experiences: These are situations through which the Holy Spirit predisposes the mind and heart of the founder. They allow them to read from God’s perspective the difficult events that have shaped their personality, discovering that in this way Paul’s words are fulfilled: “We know that God works all things for the good of those who love him, of those whom he has called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
In Louise’s life, the propedeutic situations began at the time of her birth: her father was a widower and she never knew her mother. Her education was entrusted to the Dominican Sisters of Poissy, where she remained until she was about 13 years old. When she was in the difficult stage of adolescence, her father died. Her uncle Michael became her guardian, who took her to a boarding house where she learned what was necessary for domestic life.
At the age of 15, she had the desire to become a Capuchin nun, but given her fragile health, the spiritual director of the convent refused her request, saying one of the phrases that will remain engraved in the heart of the young Louise: “You cannot be a nun because you are not healthy and because God has other plans for you”. How would a teenager who lacked her mother’s affection and who had lost her father for two years have received such a refusal?
But Luisa’s propaedeutic experience was not over yet. On 5 February she married Antoine Legras, and the first years of their marriage were happy ones. In 1617 things changed politically for the Marillacs and in 1622, Antoine fell ill. Louise blamed herself and wondered if it was not a punishment for not having entered religion. She had a very bad time during those years. She was anguished, had doubts about her faith and probably suffered from depression.
These propaedeutic experiences in Luisa’s life were paths towards the perfection of charity, which made her docile to the action of the Spirit. These experiences sharpened her sensitivity to certain human and Christian aspects, which would develop as essential elements in the new project of her life.
c) Development of the founding inspirations: She begins to give form and life to a project which is not properly hers, but the development of the concrete expression of God’s love. Ciardi affirms that it is “an evolutionary process of continuity, always guided by the action of the Spirit, who also here works directly or indirectly through external factors, until its full formulation, often consigned in the rule”.
In Louise’s life, this dimension became progressively more concrete. First of all, around 1630, Providence placed in her and Vincent’s path Marguerite Naseau, who offered to help the Ladies of Charity in Paris. Marguerite was followed by others and Louise began to propose to Vincent a new community to serve the poor. In a second moment, the founding of the company took place on 29 November 1633, the eve of St. Andrew’s Day. After a long process of discernment, Mary, Nicolasse, Jeanne and Michaela met in Louise’s house and the Company of the Daughters of Charity was born. Marguerite Nasseau could not be part of the group, as she had died a few months earlier, a victim of her heroic charity, having shared her bed with a woman suffering from the plague. With the birth of the Company, Louise became a creative and daring mother. With the “pedagogy of tenderness” she accompanied her daughters in the service of the poor. The discernment begun at the illumination of Pentecost demanded more depth each day, and she advanced along this path, accompanying and forming the first Daughters of Charity.
Christological dimension
The pneumatic action is concretised in the Christological and evangelical function, because also as the Apostle says: “The Spirit himself comes to our aid in our weakness because we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Rom 8,26).
In this way, the inspiration which comes from the Holy Spirit presents the founder with a mystery of Christ which contains within itself a salvific message. This Christological dimension and its message is a fact experienced by the founder, so that he does not tell what “others have told him” but shares a personal experience.
This Christological experience-dimension does not imply an absolute originality in the founders. For they drew from the sources of the spirituality of their time, and in turn the contemplatives of their time drew from the rich Christological spiritual heritage of the Church, present in the Church since its origins.
Jesus Christ gradually took centre stage in Luisa’s spiritual experience. It is not that Luisa was not “Christian” at first, but that she was strongly influenced by the spiritualities of the time, especially by the Abstract School. Benito Martínez in studying Louise’s writings between 1627 and 1639 states that in this period “she only mentions Jesus twice and Our Lord once, while the word God appears more than twenty times” (Martínez, B., La Señorita Le Gras y Santa Luisa de Marillac, CEME, Salamanca, 1991, p. 155). As she entered into the spirituality of Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul, a Christocentric spirituality became more firmly established in her, based on the contemplation and appreciation of the mystery of the Incarnation in all the moments of the life of Jesus Christ: “God’s love for mankind, which led him to will that his Son should become man, because his delight is to be with the children of men, and so that by accommodating himself to the state of men he might give them all the testimonies which his human life contains that God has loved them from all eternity” (C. 105).
She advanced her Christocentric spirituality in her appreciation of the Eucharistic mystery. We can say that Louise de Marillac was truly a Eucharistic woman. The Eucharist is for her communion and spiritual encounter with Jesus incarnate: “In the loving union (of the Eucharist) God, seeing himself in us, restores to us his likenesses entirely by the communication, not only of his grace, but of himself, who applies to us so effectively the merit of his life and death that he makes us capable of living in him, having him alive in us” (W 97).
Luisa’s spiritual Christocentrism sustained her apostolate, first as Visitor of the Confraternities of Charity and then as mother-mentor-educator of the Company; in both stages she discovered and strengthened her vocation as a servant of the poor. As her love-bond with Christ grew, her interior life intensified, she was always ready to cultivate it and she accompanied the sisters in this mystagogical process. She expressed this spirit in a correspondence to Sister Jeanne Delacroix: “(Without an interior life) exterior actions, even if they are for the service of the poor, can neither please God nor merit us any reward, unless they are united to those of our Lord” (C. 722). All this leads him to place the model of Jesus Christ at the centre of the life of the nascent company and to urge the sisters, together with Vincent, to love the spirit of the company. He did not hesitate to affirm that “the spirit of the Society is the spirit of Our Lord” (C 114).
We know that the mystery of Christ is inexhaustible, but Louise, like Vincent, presents to her disciples a dimension of this unfathomable mystery: Christ the evangeliser.[2] In words similar to those of Vincent, she writes: “We live, then, as dead in Jesus Christ and, as such, no resistance to Jesus, no action except for Jesus, no thought except in Jesus, in short, to live nothing but for Jesus and for our neighbour, so that in this love which unites, I may love all that Jesus loves” (W 69).
Although Louise does not explicitly quote a Gospel text from which we can deduce her Christology, we can see in her correspondence and writings that she follows and imitates Christ the evangeliser. And so her life “becomes a “living exegesis” and “its realisation”, in Ciardi’s words.
Ecclesial dimension
Ciardi affirms “the fundamental inspiration, in addition to the Christological and evangelical aspect, contains a particular perception of the social and ecclesial situation. It gives the founder the ability to read the signs of the times and to interpret them in the light of God’s plan”.
Louise de Marillac felt herself to be a daughter of the Church and she made her daughters part of that same experience, founded and formed to take care of the poor, “privileged members and recipients of the action of the Church” (Delgado, C., Luisa de Marillac y la Iglesia, CEME, Salamanca, 1981, p. 109). (Delgado, C., Luisa de Marillac y la Iglesia, CEME, Salamanca, 1981, p. 109). Her concern, like Vincent’s, was to make it clear that the Daughters of Charity were not religious. In this way she proposes to her daughters a new way of consecrated life, where the apostolate of service to the poor is at the centre. When he insists that “they will not be religious” it is to avoid enclosure and to seek to propose charitable service as a means of perfection, for he tells them: “The Daughters of Charity are obliged to work to be more perfect than the religious themselves” (C. 739).
One event in Louise’s life may perhaps give rise to questioning her obedience to the Church, but we see in this episode the search to respond to God’s will according to the ecclesial reality of the time and thus to give ecclesial support to her foundation. We are referring to the dependence of the Daughters of Charity on the Superior General of the Congregation of the Mission. Louise saw that the attempts at secular groupings ended up as religious congregations under the protection of the local ordinaries, and so she sought, even against Vincent’s wishes, to place the nascent company under the direction of the Superior General. In one of his letters to Vincent he expresses the certainty that the Society must be faithful to “the direction which God has given it”, saying: “In the name of God, Father, do not allow the slightest thing to creep in which might lead the Society to depart from the direction which God has given it; be sure that then it will cease to be what it is now and that the poor sick will be left without help; and I believe that then God’s will for us will no longer be fulfilled” (SVP III, 115).
Another novelty in the life of Louise and of the nascent company was the form and purpose of the taking of vows. Faithful to the spiritual current of her time, the “devotional movement”, she insists on the importance of taking vows, but at the same time she is aware that this act should not be interpreted as a religious act. In this way she performs an ecclesial practice, but puts the end of the community in the first place. The formula insists on the end: “To dedicate myself all this year to the corporal and spiritual service of the sick poor”. On 25 March 1642 (nine years after the genesis of the Company), Louise de Marillac and four sisters made perpetual vows. These vows are understood only from the time of baptismal consecration; she gives support to this practice and subscribes to it (Delgado, C., op. cit., 122). In the early days of the Society there will be a variable practice of vows, some taking vows for one year, others perpetually. The Rule of 1655 says nothing about the practice, and the General Statutes and Regulations of 1718 take the practice of annual vows as normal. For Louise, the vows were based on “the death of Christ on the cross and his promise; they are an exercise of surrendering one’s own will to God and allow one to enter into a very familiar dialogue with God and to share in all his goods”. (Delgado, C., op. cit., 119).
The nascent company provided adequate responses to the ecclesial and social urgencies of the French 17th century. One of the important tasks of the Church was to care for “the most fragile members of the Church”, the “souls redeemed by the blood of the Son of God”, “the members of Jesus”, so Louise became an “executive” of this mission, drawing on the spiritual riches of the ecclesial tradition and placing her nascent company at the service of the Church, because a Daughter of Charity is doubly a daughter of the Church: by her baptism and by her dedication to the service of the poor. (Cf. Delgado, C., op. cit., 124)
Fertility dimension
Ciardi affirms that “the founder’s charism includes, as its most characteristic feature, an element of fruitfulness, which makes the person capable of transmitting to others the contents of the fundamental inspiration”. Louise’s human and spiritual process formed her into a “creative and daring mother”. And from this creativity and audacity she was able to transmit to the first sisters the gift received, making them disciples attracted by the project of an organised charity, and in turn, in order to reach it, to promote an effective formation to serve “the members of Jesus” as they should.
How did Louise become a fruitful and audacious mother? By integrating in herself the riches of a profoundly human person and at the same time open to transcendence (to the Spirit). And in this way she became a resilient woman. Having lived through traumatic experiences of pain (not having known her mother, losing her father when she was a teenager, not being accepted to enter religious life, illness and death of her husband) she was able to move forward and become an empathetic woman and therefore fruitful in the formation of the Daughters of Charity and in the service of the poor.
Because Louise de Marillac was a fruitful mother, she remains a role model today. In a direct way we see the fruit of her fruitfulness in the lives of fourteen thousand Daughters of Charity throughout the world. And in the attractiveness of her life and charitable daring for all Christians who seek to respond to Christ by serving him in the poor.
Works consulted:
CIARDI, Fabio, Founders, men of the spirit: for a theology of the founder’s charism, Madrid, Paulines, 1983.
Coste, Pedro, Obras completas de San Vicente de Paúl, Salamanca, CEME, 1980.
De Marillac, S. Luisa, Correspondencias y Escritos, Salamanca, CEME, 1985.
Delgado, Corpus, Luisa de Marillac y la Iglesia, CEME, Salamanca, 1981.
MEZZADRI, Luigi, San Vicente de Paúl: el santo de la caridad, Salamanca, CEME, 2012.
Martínez, Benito, La Señorita Le Gras y Santa Luisa de Marillac, CEME, Salamanca, 1991.
___
[1] This article was published in Anales de la Congregación de la Misión y de las Hijas de la Caridad de España, 2022, Vol. 130, p. 397-404.
[2] With the adjective “evangeliser” we want to encompass the missionary Christology that implies the servant dimension. If we avoid using the adjectives “evangeliser and servant” together, it is not because we forget the latter, but simply because we understand that evangelisation implies the servanthood of the good news, which heals, liberates, enlightens and proclaims (cf. Lk 4:18-19).
Fr. Hugo Ricardo Sosa, CM
