Saint Marie of the Incarnation Guyart

Saint Marie of the Incarnation, born Marie Guyart, was a wife, mother, and widow, and later an Ursuline. In 1639 she set out from France for Canada and founded the Ursuline monastery in Quebec. John Paul II recalled that she has rightly been called the mother of the Catholic Church in Canada. The Church commemorates her on April 30.

She was born in Tours on October 28, 1599. As she herself recounted, when she was seven years old the Lord asked her in a dream whether she wished to belong to him, and she answered yes. Although she felt drawn to religious life, at seventeen, in keeping with her parents’ wishes, she married Claude Martin, a silk craftsman. After two years of marriage she was widowed and left alone with her son Claude, then a few months old. She wound up her husband’s failing business and returned without means to her father’s house.

She declined a proposal to marry again. She led a deep life of prayer in which, as she wrote, she received special mystical graces, while her brother-in-law entrusted her with running his transport business. In January 1631 she placed her son, then about twelve years old, in the care of her sister and entered the Ursulines of Tours, taking the name Marie of the Incarnation. The separation was painful for both of them: the boy came to the monastery and cried out for his mother to be given back to him, and she later confessed how much she had suffered.

In the monastery her missionary vocation matured. On May 4, 1639, she sailed from Dieppe with two other Ursulines and three Hospitaller sisters; they were accompanied by Madeleine de la Peltrie, who devoted her fortune to the new foundation. On August 1 they reached Quebec. Marie never returned to France.

She was the first superior of the Ursulines in New France. The sisters received and raised Indigenous and French girls together; this was the first school for girls in the colony. Marie learned the languages of the local peoples and wrote dictionaries, catechisms, and prayers in them; among other works she composed catechisms in the languages of the Huron, the Iroquois, and the Algonquin. When fire destroyed the monastery at the end of 1650, she rebuilt it. Her door was open to all, French and Indigenous alike, who sought counsel, help, or shelter.

At the request of her son, who had become a Benedictine, she wrote an account of her life of prayer. Bossuet called her the Teresa of the New World. Some three hundred of her letters to family, friends, and benefactors in France have survived, valuable also for the history of Canada; after her death her son published her life and letters. She died in Quebec on April 30, 1672.

John Paul II beatified her on June 22, 1980, together with François de Laval. On April 3, 2014, Pope Francis declared her a saint by an equivalent canonization, extending her cult to the whole Church, and on October 12 of that year he celebrated in the Vatican Basilica a Mass of thanksgiving for the canonization of both.