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Our Founder
Adèle-Euphrasie Barbier (known in religious life as Marie du Coeur de Jésus "Mary of the Heart of Jesus") was born on 4 January 1829, in Caen, France into an industrious lower middle class family. It was a family in which a strong Catholic faith was important, and as a young girl, Euphrasie appreciated her mother Jeanne's deep and vibrant faith, and its importance for their family. The example of her father Louis, a shoemaker, taught Euphrasie the importance of a job well done and honestly completed. Euphrasie was one of those who yearned to be a foreign missionary. This was not surprising as her father had been born in Guadeloupe, a French colony in the Caribbean Sea. In 1848 Euphrasie entered a new missionary institute known as the Sisters of Calvary which had been established at Cuves some three years earlier. Euphrasie believed that this congregation would allow her to fulfill her hopes of becoming a foreign missionary. In 1851 she left for London. However, her hopes of being a foreign missionary were frustrated by the immediate and real apostolic needs that the increasing number of Irish Catholic immigrants fled. In December 1861 a new congregation, Institute de Notre Dame des Missions was born in Lyon with the aim of working in the foreign missions. Euphrasie Barbier sent her first missionaries to New Zealand in 1864. Other departures followed at regular intervals to New Zealand, to Australia, to England, to Wallis, Tonga and Samoa in Oceania and to Chittagong in what is now Bangladesh. The cry of the poor meant that the Sisters began caring for orphans in Deal, England in 1870, and in 1876, a house was opened in the industrial city of Armentières so that the Sisters could work with working class young girls and women. When Euphrasie died in 1893, there were two hundred and five professed sisters. |
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