The Despised Nun in Her Glory

In the Catholic world, it is sometimes suggested that an opposition exists between Church doctrine, on one hand, and mercy, specifically pastoral care, on the other. A pretense is proposed that somehow, the unrealistic demands of Church in faith and morals must be modified to match the particular lived experience of Christians. Orthodoxy and care for the marginalized are presented as being in hopeless contradiction.

However, if you had suggested such things to one particular little marginalized French Canadian nun about a hundred years ago, she would have set you straight as far as she thought you were ready for it, and then probably would tell a joke while she painstakingly did her other sisters’ laundry.

This is a woman worth meeting. Her name is Blessed Marie Anne Blondin. She cheerfully lived Church teaching on obedience, resistance to immoral commands, and fraternal correction, and she did it while being repressed by the men she obeyed, resisted, and fraternally corrected.

She was born Esther Blondin to poor, devout farmers just outside Montreal in 1809. Though she was too busy working to learn to read until she was twenty-two, she eventually discerned a call to found a religious order dedicated to teaching. She was struck by the widespread illiteracy among the French Catholic population in Canada, and she wanted to remedy it.

This situation must not be characterized merely as a matter of secular educational attainment; souls were at stake. There are times and places where skills like reading might not be necessary for a full, human, Catholic life. Nineteenth-century Canada was certainly not one of them. French Catholics lived under a Protestant, British government that had its own educational imperatives, scornful of, if not hostile to, Catholicism.

Esther’s twofold solution, presented to the Bishop of Montreal, was this: to found a religious congregation of teaching sisters, “for the education of poor country children, both girls and boys in the same schools.” At this time, the parochial schools were not doing the job adequately, partly because of the local Catholic expectation of single-sex education. Because poor country parishes could not support two schools, they simply had none.

As a teacher at an all-boys school myself, I am sympathetic to the ideal of single-sex education. However, this ideal is not itself a first principle of education, as any homeschooling mom with sons and daughters will tell you. Esther Blondin understood the distinction between a principle and a mere practice, and she pressed against convention for the greater glory of God.

Bishop Bourget approved the mission and the foundation of the congregation of the Sisters of St. Anne in 1950, appointing Esther as the superior with the professed name “Marie Anne.” The community began to grow. Mother Marie Anne’s reputation, however, did not.

The reason was that the chaplain appointed to the Motherhouse, Fr. Louis Adolphe Maréchal, began to misuse his authority. For one thing, he tried to take over the administration of the schools. For another, and much more seriously, he indicated to the sisters of the congregation that they were to confess only to him! This request was taken to the following extreme: if he was absent from the Motherhouse for a period of time, they should wait for him to return before going to confession

Mother Marie Anne fought all of these encroachments—encroachments that lay Catholics of today can to various degrees sympathize with. Imagine a priest in your diocese having the final say on the education of your children! Or consider how misplaced and misnamed the “obedience” would be that would require us to put off recourse to the sacrament of confession!

Unfortunately, Bishop Bourget sided with Fr. Maréchal. He asked Mother Marie Anne to resign her superiorship in 1854. She was placed over a daughter-house for a few years, until Fr. Maréchal succeeded in having her relieved of all responsibilities and sent back to the Motherhouse in disgrace. From 1858 until her death in 1890, she worked in the laundry room.

What was her state of mind during these long, unseen years? Based on her sayings and her actions, it was one of avid, loving abandonment to God’s will.

Mother Marie Anne illustrates by her life the sound attitude toward obedience presented by many of the great teachers of the Catholic faith, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas on one hand fully describes the honor for authority we must have to possess the virtue of obedience. We must always simply fulfill the command of our superiors as long as the command is not immoral. Even if we believe that a superior’s command is immoral, we must not publicly criticize or rebuke him. Rather, we must proceed by stages, first privately addressing the superior.

Mother Marie Anne would not bend to the commands of her superiors, whether bishop or priest, if she believed that doing so would hurt her sisters’ souls. And it is clear that her resistance was prudent. However, she was just as ready to submit to absolutely anything that affected only her or her status . . . and “anything” is a significant word here. Unlike many other saints who died in humiliation, but were immediately revered and praised right after their deaths, Mother Marie Anne remained in obscurity for years after her death, being rehabilitated only almost three decades later.

The power of grace, and the doctrine of its supernatural origin, is perfectly revealed in Blessed Marie Anne Blondin. We can be marginalized, even by fellow Catholics, and still live the Catholic faith in a graceful, cheerful, holy manner.