St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Foundress of the Good Shepherd Sisters

Who was St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier?

St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier was a French religious who founded the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Good Shepherd Sisters. Her sisters went looking for the women and girls the world had given up on, like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one lost sheep. In thirty-three years as superior general she founded 110 convents. She died at Angers in 1868, and Pope Pius XII canonized her in 1940. We keep her feast on April 24.

Her life

A childhood on Noirmoutier

She was born Rose-Virginie Pelletier on July 31, 1796, on the island of Noirmoutier off the Atlantic coast of France. The French Revolution had reached even this small island, and her parents had been imprisoned there. Her father was a doctor who cared for the islanders and for their jailers alike, and her mother fed the hungry and nursed the sick. The girl grew up watching that kind of charity.

The Refuge at Tours

As a teenager she was sent to boarding school in Tours, where she came to know the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge. That order had been founded in 1641 by St. John Eudes to care for women who wanted to leave a life of prostitution and begin again. Rose-Virginie entered the Refuge at Tours in 1814, at eighteen, and made her vows in 1816, taking the name Mary of St. Euphrasia.

She was soon put in charge of the "penitents," the women and girls the convent sheltered. About eight years after her profession, while still very young, she was elected superior of the house at Tours.

Angers and the Good Shepherd

In 1829 the bishop of Angers asked for a house of the Refuge in his diocese, and Mother Euphrasia went with five sisters to found it. She saw that the work needed more than independent convents, each on its own. On April 3, 1835, Pope Gregory XVI approved Angers as a mother house with a superior general over all the houses that came from it. The new institute took the name Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers.

Thirty-three years

Mother Euphrasia governed the Good Shepherd for thirty-three years. The Catholic Encyclopedia counts 110 convents and sixteen provinces founded in that time. At her death the congregation had 2,067 professed sisters, 384 novices and 309 extern sisters, and its houses were caring for 6,372 penitents and 8,483 children. She died at Angers in April 1868.

Her cause was opened in Rome on November 17, 1886, less than twenty years after her death, and the preliminary inquiry closed in 1890. Petitions poured in asking Leo XIII to set aside the usual waiting period, and he declared her Venerable on December 11, 1897. Pius XI beatified her on April 30, 1933, and Pius XII canonized her in 1940.

Her words

The Good Shepherd Sisters still repeat the advice she gave young sisters about the girls in their care:

It is not enough that you love them, they must know that you love them.

Why St. Mary Euphrasia is a patron saint

She is the mother and patron of the Good Shepherd Sisters, who today serve women and children in many countries. The women her houses first received were often victims of poverty and abuse, so she is invoked for abuse victims, for single mothers and for women and girls caught up in trafficking or exploitation.

Symbols of St. Mary Euphrasia in art

She lived in the nineteenth century, and her images follow portraits made in her lifetime. Look for:

• A white habit with a long veil: the habit of Our Lady of Charity.
• A silver heart on her breast: the emblem of the order, carried from St. John Eudes's devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
• The Good Shepherd, a shepherd's crook or a lamb: the name and spirit of her congregation.
• Women and girls gathered around her, sometimes with a child in her arms.

Where St. Mary Euphrasia is honored

Her tomb is in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception at the Good Shepherd Mother House in Angers, a small chapel built in 1835. Since 2016 the mother house has also held a Good Shepherd Museum, in the building where the sisters settled when they arrived in Angers in 1829. On Noirmoutier, her birthplace still stands in the old town. See the feast day calendar for other April saints and the patron saints index.

Prayer to St. Mary Euphrasia

We have no traditional prayer to her that we can quote here. Her sisters keep her memory with their own prayers on her feast. Let us ask St. Mary Euphrasia to pray for women and girls who have been hurt or exploited, for mothers raising children alone, and for everyone who works to bring the lost sheep home: St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, pray for us.