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 ominican
annals list a great many founders and foundresses among
the members of the Order. These are people who founded Dominican
houses or provinces, or people who founded institutes under
Dominican direction. Few, if any, of these worthy people
tried so long or so earnestly to make a Dominican foundation
as Sister Mary Poussepin. And then she saw her efforts fail
in the end. She is remembered today as the foundress of
the Dominican Sisters of Charity of the Presentation, an
institute which only within the past century has been recognized
as a part of the regular Dominican sisterhood.
Mary
Poussepin was born in the diocese of Versailles in 1653.
Her well to do family had a reputation for both sanctity
and sound business. She was a gay hearted and generous girl,
well liked by all her friends. Her gifts of mind and judgment
were far beyond her years. She might have entered religion
earlier, but the illness of her mother required her constant
care. When Mary was twenty two, her mother died, and the
girl took over the management of the house. She had the
consoling thought that as soon as the shock of her mother's
death had worn off, she would approach her father on the
question of becoming a cloistered nun. In the meantime,
she busied herself with the care of her young brother, and
all the pious works she could do in a day. It soon became
apparent that her plans for contemplative life would have
to be revised, for her father fell ill, and she was needed
to care for him.
Since
her home was situated conveniently between the hospital
of the Sisters of Charity and the church where the Dominican
Third Order regularly met, Mary Poussepin soon found herself
involved in the charities of the one and the spiritual life
of the other. She became a Tertiary, and she placed herself
under the guidance of a Dominican confessor, who was to
watch over her for nearly half a century. Working with the
Sisters of Charity, she was constantly aware of the needs
of the sick and the unfortunate, and she began to dream
of a Dominican community in which these works could become
a part of the apostolate. Not until after her father's death
could she set about making this dream a reality, but, from
the records of those intervening years, it is clear that
she lost neither time nor opportunity in either charitable
works or spirituality.
Mary
Poussepin was thirty years old when at last she was free
to follow her heart and begin the institute that she had
so long dreamed of. It is a little hard for us to see why
she should have had such difficulty in making the ideas
attractive to higher authorities, for in America we have
a proud tradition of Dominican sisters doing the various
works of charity which she espoused. At that time and place,
however, it was evidently a novelty for Dominican sisters
to care for the orphans or the poor, the insane or the wayward.
Reading between the lines, moreover, one is quite certain
that the bishop with whom most of her negotiations had to
be made was a man who heartily disliked Dominicans. It is
impossible now to know with certainty the reasons for the
things that occurred. We can only record the facts, and
presume that the reasons at the time were ample.
Mary
Poussepin began her institute of the Dominican Sisters of
Charity in Angerville. She started with high hopes and one
companion, and postulants soon came to fill the ranks. The
sisters wore the colors of the Order quite probably they
were not permitted the same form of religious habit as that
worn by the regular communities of Dominicans. They had
a Dominican director, and everyone agrees the Dominican
spirit. But when it came to obtaining affiliation with the
Order, they were blocked by the bishop's refusal and probably
in view of this by the reluctance of the Order to force
their claims. The people of the town called the sisters
"Jacobines," an allusion to the Dominican fathers;
but, for nearly two hundred years, that was as near as they
came to regular affiliation.
After
several false starts, which necessitated moving and beginning
again, the community prospered. It cared for schools, hospitals,
kindergartens, and homes for the aged, the insane, and the
delinquent. Their houses spread over France and were recognized,
both civilly and ecclesiastically, as a religious institute
with all the rights and privileges except the one for which
the foundress had struggled for a lifetime: official acceptance
into the . Dominican family. At the age of ninety, as she
lay on her deathbed, her hopes seemed ruined forever when
she received word that all affiliations with the Order even
the solemnizing of the feast of St. Dominic must be abandoned
if she did not wish the rights of her institute taken away
completely. All that she had striven to establish had come
to nothing. Accepting the will of God, she commanded her
sisters to remain spiritually close to the great Order she
loved, and she died with no assurance that they would ever
realize her desire.
Half
a century after the death of Mary Poussepin, the French
Revolution broke upon the country. Dispersed, and wearing
secular clothes, hiding and working in dangerous places,
the sisters took advantage of the occasion to resume the
first habit and all the customs from the primitive days.
A few years later, more Dominican privileges were granted,
and the sisters pressed the question of affiliation. Not
until 1897, two full centuries after the foundress first
began her project, was her community allowed to use the
full tide "Dominican Sisters of Charity of the Presentation
of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary."
Sisters
of Mother Poussepin's foundation have been in Near East
missions, Mesopotamia, and Kurdistan, as well as France,
Spain, and Italy, for the past century. They also have missions
in South America, and they have been in the United States,
in Fall River, Massachusetts, since 1906.
(Source
: Dorcy, Marie Jean. St. Dominic's Family. Tan
Books and Publishers, 1983)
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