Bio

 

Madeleine Sophie was born two months premature on the night of a neighbor's house fire. She was frail and sickly and was baptized immediately since many thought she would not survive. She did, however, and grew up in a French peasant family. Her father was a cooper and vine grower and made enough money to support the family. Her older brother Louis, a seminarian, decided that Sophie needed to learn as well, and took to educating her himself. He taught her history, natural science, physics, mathematics, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian, which was not common for the education of women at the time.

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Louis, who became a priest at the height of the French Revolution renounced his oath to the Revolution and so had to try and hide first in his family’s attic before fleeing to Paris and then being arrested there. He was imprisoned for two years and barely escaped execution. When he was released, he took Sophie with him to Paris, where she learned embroidery and became an excellent seamstress. She discerned when she was 18 that she wanted to enter religious life, but since the Carmelites had been abolished with the revolution, she worked quietly and secretly learned as well as taught the catechism to children.

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Louis’ superior, named Joseph Varin, had a goal to establish a new educational religious society, and found Madeleine Sophie to be the one for the job. She became part of the new Order and went to teach in Amiens, France in 1801. She founded a second convent in Grenoble in 1804, and then was elected Superior General of the Order for life. Her Society of the Sacred Heart, as she called it, was granted official approval in 1826. She held her position for 63 years, during which her group grew to over 3,500 members in Europe, the Americas, and North Africa, opening more than 100 schools. These schools not only had excellent reputations, but were always accompanied by a second school designed specifically for the education of the impoverished members of the community, so that they could have an education as good as their peers’ that they may otherwise have never received. Sophie’s love of education extended to her wish for every student, especially impoverished young girls, to be blessed with one such as hers.

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Sophie was paralyzed in 1865, and passed away later that year.