Saint Emily de Rodat

Her congregation's chronology has her born on September 6, 1787, at the chateau of Druelle, near Rodez, the first child of Jean-Louis Guillaume Amans de Rodat and Henriette de Pomairols, and baptized the next day at Saint-Martin-de-Limouze; Avvenire gives that village as her birthplace. ²⁴ Both families were of the old nobility, in Daniele Bolognini's account. ² She was baptized Marie Guillemette Émilie, the names under which the Martyrology lists her. ¹²

From 1789, to keep her from the dangers of the Revolution, she was entrusted to her maternal grandmother, Marie Marguerite de Pomairols, at Ginals, near Villefranche-de-Rouergue; Domenico Agasso places the grandmother at "Villeneuve de Rouergue." ²⁴ Bolognini says an aunt lived there too, a Visitation nun turned out of her convent. ² Emily made her First Communion in the chapel at Ginals in 1798, half in secret, the times being what they were. ²⁴

At sixteen, Bolognini writes, she chafed at the austere life she had been raised in, changed confessors, quarreled with her grandmother, and went home to her parents, where she found the household just as dull. ² The turn came on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1804, when she resolved to spend her whole life for the glory of God. ²

In 1805 she moved into the house of Saint-Cyr at Villefranche, where she had been at school, and chose the Abbé Antoine Marty as her director. ²⁵ The house had opened in 1800 as a gathering place for nuns of the suppressed orders. ⁴ Bolognini explains why she could not simply join them: they came from different congregations, kept no single rule, and were too old to welcome her ideas. ²

Marty sent her to look elsewhere, three times. ² The congregation dates the attempts: in 1809 to the Sisters of Nevers at Figeac and to the Picpus sisters at Cahors, and in 1812 to the house of Mercy at Moissac. ⁵ Each came to nothing, and each time, Bolognini says, she went back to Villefranche uncertain and grieved. ²

The answer came in the spring of 1815, on a visit to a sick woman. ² Bolognini says she saw then what poverty was doing to the families around Villefranche, and that the lasting way to change their children's lives was to teach them. ² The congregation's chronology records the words in which she understood it, translated here from the French: "I shall be the teacher of the poor." ⁵

Avvenire dates the foundation to 1815, and the Catholic Encyclopedia to 1816. ²⁷ The congregation keeps both dates: the call understood in May 1815 and confirmed by Marty, and on April 30, 1816, a move into the Alric house, where on May 3, with three companions, she opened a free class. ³⁵ On that day, it says, the congregation was born. ³ Its history describes the house as a tower, windy and badly insulated. ⁶

Bolognini tells the beginning a little differently: forty children taught first in a small room at Saint-Cyr, then a rented room, until the nuns of Saint-Cyr left their house to her, by which time she and eight companions had taken vows and the children numbered a hundred. ² The community took its definitive name, the Holy Family, in 1822, and the motherhouse moved later to the old Franciscan convent of the Cordeliers, where it still is. ³⁶

In 1819 she bought an abandoned monastery, and then an epidemic killed several of the sisters and some of the orphan girls. ² There was scandal. ² Bolognini says she felt unworthy of the work and thought of ending it by merging her community into the newly founded Daughters of Mary, and that it was her companions who persuaded her to go on. ²

Her health began to fail in those years: a tumor of the nose, and a permanent ringing in her ears, both of which stayed with her for the rest of her life. ² She opened a house at Aubin, where she had gone for treatment, over the objection of Marty, who had been made vicar general of Rodez and ended their collaboration. ²

She wanted her sisters to live their consecration in silence and prayer, the congregation says, with the cloister to protect it, in great simplicity and close fraternal life on the model of the Holy Family of Nazareth. ³ Bolognini says that she loved contemplative prayer above all, and founded enclosed communities that became the silent engine of the whole work. ²

In 1834 the congregation opened its first rural community, at Lassouts in the north of the Aveyron, and the institute was divided into two branches, the enclosed sisters and the sisters of the schools. ⁶ Its biography says that she discovered then the needs of working people and the countryside, and did not hesitate to found sisters without enclosure so that the Gospel could be preached to the poor; from then on the work reached beyond poor children and the sick to prisoners and prostitutes. ³ The Catholic Encyclopedia, in 1912, describes the order as teaching and nursing, with its motherhouse at Villefranche and "many convents throughout the diocese." ⁷

Bolognini adds a sketch of her: a strong character, at times austere enough to cause friction, who found a way through every problem with courtesy and wit, and who in her last years lived perhaps too self-effacingly for fear of pride. ² The congregation says that at the end of her life she was taken by another call, to the missions, and spent her last strength stirring up zeal for them. ³

In April 1852 the tumor reached her left eye. ² Knowing how ill she was, she resigned as superior general, and she died on September 19. ¹² By the congregation's count the Holy Family had thirty-five communities at work; Agasso counts thirty-six houses in France. ²⁶ Her tomb, Bolognini says, became a place of pilgrimage, and her body is kept at the motherhouse in Villefranche. ²

Pius XII beatified her in 1940 and canonized her in the Holy Year 1950, on April 23. ² The congregation went on to open its first house abroad at Beirut in 1894, and reached its height in France in 1902, with 199 communities and 1,326 professed sisters, before the laws against the congregations sent many of them abroad. ⁶

No source used for this page names a patronage for Saint Emily de Rodat, and none is claimed here. ¹²³ She is honored as the foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Villefranche, who still keep her motherhouse. ²⁶

Saint Emily de Rodat's feast is September 19, the day of her death. ¹² The Roman Martyrology lists her that day at Villefranche, as the virgin who founded the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family for the formation of girls and the care of the poor. ¹

For ten years she looked for a convent that would take her as she was, and none did. ²⁵ What she found in the end was a sick woman's house and the children around it. ²

She nearly gave the work away after the epidemic of 1819, when sisters and orphans died and the town talked. ² It was her companions who held her to it. ²

She kept both halves of her vocation: enclosed sisters to pray, and sisters without enclosure to go into the villages and the prisons. ³⁶ The congregation calls it trust in Providence with a daring "that defies all human prudence," in a translation from its French. ³

She worked for many years with an illness that did not let up, and asked to be relieved of her office only when it reached her eye. ²