Marie of the Incarnation (Ursuline)

Marie of the Incarnation Guyart

Marie of the Incarnation (née Marie Guyart; 28 October 1599 – 30 April 1672) was a French Ursuline nun, missionary, mystic, educator, and writer who founded the Ursuline monastery of Quebec and helped establish the first institution devoted to the education of girls in North America. One of the major mystical writers of seventeenth-century French Catholicism, she produced a large body of autobiographical, spiritual, and epistolary writings and also composed catechetical and linguistic works in several Indigenous languages of New France.

Quotes

• (About François de Montmorency-Laval) He is a man of great merit and distinguished virtue; it is not men who have chosen him; I will say in all truth that he lives as a saint and as an apostle.

• Quoted in Pope John Paul II, Santa messa per la proclamazione di cinque nuovi beati, Vatican City, 22 June 1980.

• My body was in your monastery but my spirit could not be locked up. The Spirit of Jesus took me to the Indies, to Japan, to America, to the East, to the West, to the areas of Canada and the Hurons, and to all the inhabited land where there are reasonable souls whom he saw as belonging to Jesus Christ.

• Quoted in Pope John Paul II, Santa messa per la proclamazione di cinque nuovi beati, Vatican City, 22 June 1980.

Quotes about

• The missionaries served the Mission of the Church, breaking the bread of the Word for the little ones and the most distant and bringing to all the gift of inexhaustible love, which flows from the very heart of the Savior.

Thus were Saint Francis de Laval and Saint Mary of the Incarnation. [...] Let these two who –so to speak– founded the Church of Quebec help us as intercessors. May the seed sown by them grow and bear fruit of brave, far-sighted new men and women, with their hearts open to the Lord's call.

• Pope Francis, quoted in Santa messa di ringraziamento per la canonizzazione equipollente di due santi canadesi, Rome, 12 October 2014.

• Mary of the Incarnation admirably combines contemplation and action. In her, the Christian woman has realized herself fully and with a rare balance, in the different states of life: wife, mother, widow, business manager, religious, mystical, missionary, and this always in fidelity to Christ, always in close union with God.
  • Pope John Paul II, Santa messa per la proclamazione di cinque nuovi beati, Vatican City, 22 June 1980.

External links

• Media related to Marie of the Incarnation (Ursuline) on Wikimedia Commons