Blessed Odile Baumgarten, Daughter of Charity and Martyr of Angers

Who was Blessed Odile Baumgarten?

Blessed Odile Baumgarten was a Daughter of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul who gave her life for the faith during the French Revolution. A miller's daughter from Lorraine, she spent her religious life caring for the sick poor and ran the pharmacy of St. John's Hospital in Angers. When the revolutionary government demanded an oath that she believed would separate her from the Church, she refused. She was arrested with her fellow sister, Marie-Anne Vaillot, and the two were shot together at Avrillé, outside Angers, on February 1, 1794.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on February 19, 1984, among the 99 Martyrs of Angers. We keep her feast on February 1.

The life of Blessed Odile Baumgarten

A miller's daughter from Lorraine

Odile Baumgarten was born in 1750 in Gondrexange, a village in Lorraine in northeastern France. Her name was sometimes printed in a French form, Baugard. Fr. Thomas Davitt, C.M., the Vincentian historian whose account we follow, notes that she was the fourth child of a miller and that the three children born before her all died in infancy.

At twenty-four she asked to join the Daughters of Charity, the community founded by St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac to serve the poor. She began as a postulant at Metz, the chief city of her province. Her first assignment was a hospital in Brest, but seven months after she arrived the hospital burned down. She was then sent to St. John's Hospital in Angers.

St. John's Hospital in Angers

St. John's was an old house of charity. Davitt writes that it was built at the end of the twelfth century with the support of King Henry II of England, and that in 1639 the city entrusted it to the Daughters of Charity. It was the first hospital ever placed in their care, and St. Louise herself traveled to Angers to settle the sisters there. By the 1790s thirty-nine sisters worked in it. Sister Odile was put in charge of the pharmacy, preparing the remedies for the sick.

The Revolution reaches the hospital

At first the Revolution barely touched the hospital. In 1791 the sisters had to close their chapel and were told they could no longer use a confessor who had refused the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. They stayed at their posts and followed the advice of their superior general, Mother Antoinette Deleau, who told them to keep serving the poor and to accept every demand of the new order that was not against religion, the Church or their conscience.

In 1793 the pressure grew. The authorities set a guard on the hospital, banned the religious habit and confiscated the chapel's sacred vessels. On December 29, 1793, a new law required every woman of the former religious congregations to take the oath of Liberty and Equality within ten days, under pain of losing her place and being treated as a suspect.

Three sisters of the hospital took the oath on January 19, 1794. The official minutes say that more would have done so but for "the perfidious suggestion and evil resolutions" of the superior, Antoinette Taillade, and of Marie-Anne and Odile. The three were arrested that same day.

Her martyrdom

Marie-Anne and Odile were held first in the Calvary convent and then, from January 21, in the convent of the Good Shepherd. On January 28 they were interrogated. The handwritten record survives and gives nine lines to Marie-Anne and nine to "Audile Bangard," as the clerk spelled her name. Marie-Anne said she would not take the oath and was not afraid of what might be done to her, and that she had never gone to the Mass of a priest who had taken the oath. Almost the same words were written about Odile. Beside each name the clerk wrote the letter "F," for the firing squad.

On February 1, 1794, the condemned were tied in pairs to a long rope and marched about two kilometers out of Angers to a field at Avrillé, inside the walls of an old priory. Davitt cites a contemporary account that Marie-Anne began the Litany of Our Lady on the road and all the prisoners took it up. Abbé Simon Gruget, a priest who secretly ministered to the sisters, recorded the words with which Marie-Anne comforted Odile. Pope John Paul II quoted them at the beatification:

« Nous allons avoir le bonheur de voir Dieu, et de le posséder pour toute l'éternité... et nous en serons possédées sans crainte d'en être séparées »

"We are going to have the happiness of seeing God and possessing him for all eternity... and we shall be possessed by him without fear of ever being separated from him."

When the soldiers fired, Odile was struck and died at once. Marie-Anne, only wounded, held her in her arms until she too was killed. Odile was forty-three. More than two thousand people were shot in the same field between January and April 1794.

The Martyrs of Angers

After the Terror the faithful came to pray at the place, which became known as the Champ des Martyrs, the Martyrs' Field. A chapel dedicated to St. Louis was built there in the nineteenth century.

The Church could not examine every victim. In 1984 Pope John Paul II told pilgrims from Angers that the diocese and the Holy See had studied only the cases where the witness of martyrdom was clearest. On February 19, 1984, he beatified 99 of them, priests, religious and lay people, as Guillaume Repin and companions. The cause recognizes death for the faith; no miracle is required, and none is reported for Blessed Odile in the sources we consulted. The Pope said that what the martyrs wanted was to stay faithful to the Church, in communion with the Pope.

Symbols of Blessed Odile in art

Odile is shown as a Daughter of Charity in the gray-blue habit and large white winged cornette that the sisters wore for more than two centuries. She carries the palm of martyrdom and often a rosary. A pharmacy jar may recall her work in the hospital apothecary. She is almost always shown with Blessed Marie-Anne Vaillot, the two sisters side by side or tied together, as in the windows of the martyrs' chapel at Avrillé.

Feast day and prayer

We keep her feast on February 1, with Blessed Marie-Anne Vaillot and their companions. See the feast day calendar.

We know of no traditional prayer to her that we can quote. Let us ask her to pray for nurses and pharmacists, for all who serve the sick poor, and for every Christian whose conscience is under pressure. Blessed Odile Baumgarten, pray for us.