Saint Mary Magdalene Postel

Saint Mary Magdalene Postel, a schoolteacher from Normandy, hid persecuted priests and kept the Blessed Sacrament in her home during the French Revolution, and once peace returned she founded a religious congregation that taught poor girls. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her as a virgin on July 16, the day of her death.

She was born on November 28, 1756, in the seaside town of Barfleur, the daughter of Jean Postel and Thérèse Le Vallois. At baptism she received the names Julie Françoise Catherine. She made her First Communion in her ninth year and already then vowed her chastity to God; she renewed this vow with the Benedictine nuns in Valognes, where she went to school. After returning home she opened a school for girls, especially poor ones.

When the Revolution began to persecute the Church, priests who refused to take the oath forbidden by the pope were put to death or driven out of the country. Julie hid them in her home at the risk of her life. With the consent of her pastor she set up a chapel in the house, where Mass was secretly celebrated and the Blessed Sacrament was reserved, and when priests were lacking she was permitted to carry Communion to the sick. According to the bull of canonization, not one of the priests she hid fell into the hands of the persecutors.

In 1805 she moved to Cherbourg, where Father Louis Cabart rented a house for her school. On September 8, 1807, at the age of fifty, she and three companions made their religious vows before him as the bishop’s delegate, and she took the name Mary Magdalene. So began the congregation of the Daughters of Mercy, as the Martyrology calls it. The sisters were to teach and form poor girls as Saint John Baptist de La Salle had taught boys.

In 1811 the community left Cherbourg and for several years, in extreme poverty, moved from place to place: for six months it lived in a cowshed at Octeville-l’Avenel, then at Tamerville and in Valognes. When even Father Cabart advised dissolving the community, she replied that she trusted in divine Providence and would not abandon any of her daughters. When she was over sixty, she passed the examination that qualified her to run a school. In 1832 she acquired the ruined abbey of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, which became the motherhouse, and undertook the rebuilding of its church.

When she was over eighty, in obedience to Church authority, she adopted for her sisters the rule of Saint John Baptist de La Salle and made new vows together with them. Today the congregation bears the name of the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Mercy. She died at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte on July 16, 1846, in her ninetieth year, promising her sisters that she would remember them in heaven.

Leo XIII recognized her heroic virtues in 1903, and Pius X beatified her on May 17, 1908, in the Vatican Basilica. Pius XI canonized her on May 24, 1925, during the Holy Year, together with Magdalene Sophie Barat.