Saint Emily de Vialar

Emilie de Vialar, as her congregation writes her name, was born in 1797 in Gaillac, an old town not far from Toulouse. ² Her paternal grandfather was a magistrate, and her father held administrative posts in the town. ² Her mother's father, the Baron de Portal, came from a family of pharmacists and became physician to two kings of France, Charles X and Louis Philippe. ²

Her mother was devout and taught her the faith, and died just as Emilie was about to leave for boarding school in Paris. ² After two years there, during which she made her First Communion, her father brought her home to run his household and accompany him in society. ² The congregation says a jealous housekeeper made her life there almost intolerable, misrepresenting her to her father, and that she bore it with patience. ²

She was drawn early to prayer and to the poor and sick of Gaillac. ² At nineteen, after what the congregation calls a special spiritual experience, she began to organize her charity: she took food and remedies to the poor and had them come to her home for help. ¹² Her father did not approve. She wrote later, in her Account of Graces: "I continued to perform works of charity towards the poor and this was the occasion of many domestic troubles." ²

There was more friction over the hours she spent praying in her room and in church, and over the young men who asked to marry her and were sent away. ² She confided in the new curate, Father Mercier, who encouraged and guided her, and over time the idea took shape of a congregation that could give the sick and the poor constant care. ²

In 1832 her maternal grandfather died and left her a substantial legacy, and with it she was free to act. ² On the evening of Christmas Day she left an affectionate letter for her father, arranged for her brother's wife to look after him, and left the house. ² With three companions she began a community in Gaillac. ¹² Vatican News describes it as a new form of religious life devoted to all the poorest of the poor, caring for them in every sort of misery, and to the education of very young girls. ¹

Within six months there were twenty-six of them. ² They relieved the poor, nursed the sick and the old in their homes, and taught children for nothing, while the small town talked. ² The Archbishop of Albi, François-Marie de Gauly, approved the new institute, and Vatican News credits his support with the momentum that carried it within a few years to every continent. ¹² She wanted it called the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition. ²³

In 1833 her brother Augustin, one of the first French settlers in Algeria, asked her for sisters to staff a hospital being built there. ² It was the chance she had long wanted to work in mission countries, and in August 1835 she went out herself with the three sisters chosen. ² By the end of 1836 there were twenty. ²

Then the new bishop of Algiers, Bishop Dupuch, who had welcomed the sisters at first, tried to force changes in their rule that would have tied the congregation to his diocese alone. ² When she would not accept them he went so far as to excommunicate the sisters, depriving them of the sacraments. ² Before leaving to seek approval in Rome she set up a new foundation at Tunis. ²

Pope Gregory XVI received her in December 1840. ² She waited eighteen months while the cardinals studied the case, which included hostile reports from Bishop Dupuch, and used the time to open a house in Rome. ² The decree of praise came in May 1842, and she hurried back to Algiers to find that the French government, under pressure from the bishop, had ordered the sisters out of Algeria after eight years' service. ² They left at once, and in the legal wrangling over her properties she recovered nothing of the large sums she had spent there. ²

While she was away she had left her finances to a sister she trusted and a businessman recommended by the parish priest. ² The congregation says the trust was misplaced: records were falsified and pages went missing from the account books she had kept so carefully. ² A series of court cases followed, and the final verdict went against her, leaving her penniless and in debt. ²

Feeling against her in Gaillac grew until the work there could not go on. ² In 1847 the sisters left the town under cover of darkness and reached Toulouse at dawn. ² Gossip had arrived first. With no means of support they lived in real poverty, even joining the line at the soup kitchen, and the Bishop of Toulouse wanted to make himself superior general of the congregation. ² By 1852 she had decided to leave Toulouse too. ²

In Marseille she at last found an understanding friend in the bishop, Monsignor de Mazenod, founder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. ² Money was still short for a time. ² In 1855 she wrote to Sister Eugenie Laurez: "Had I not become poor I would not have been able to establish the Congregation." ²

In mid-August 1856 she fell ill. ² Her illness was first taken for cholera; after her death it was found to be a strangulated hernia she had suffered many years before. ² Five days later, on August 24, she died peacefully among her sisters and her nieces, and the funeral was kept as simple as possible. ¹²

She was almost fifty-nine, and the congregation had existed for twenty-four years. ² It had sent sisters to Algeria, Tunisia, France, Italy, Cyprus, Malta, Syria, Greece, Burma, Palestine, Turkey, Crete and Australia, in forty-two foundations in all. ¹² Vatican News says her sisters are now present on all five continents. ¹

Pope Pius XII canonized her in 1951, on June 17 by Vatican News's date and on June 24 by her congregation's. ¹² In 1972, Vatican News says, her remains were taken back to Gaillac, where they are venerated in the town where she was born. ¹

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Emily, so none is given here. ¹²³ The Martyrology remembers her for one thing: that, given to spreading the Gospel in distant regions, she founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition and spread the congregation with dedication. ³

Saint Emily's feast is August 24, the day of her death at Marseille. ¹ The Roman Martyrology enters her on that day. ³ In her own communities, Vatican News says, she is celebrated on June 17, which is the feast her congregation gives. ¹²

She did not leave home as a girl. She was in her mid-thirties, had kept her father's house for years, doing her charity against his wishes and enduring a housekeeper's spite, and went only when an inheritance let her provide for the work herself. ² Even then she left him a letter and someone to look after him. ²

Much of what she suffered came from inside the Church: a bishop who excommunicated her sisters, another who wanted to run her congregation, a sister she trusted with the accounts. ² The congregation's life does not soften any of it. Each time, she took the work somewhere else: to Tunis, to Rome, to Toulouse, to Marseille. ²

Her own summary is the line she wrote to Sister Eugenie in 1855, that had she not become poor she could not have established the congregation. ² The congregation adds that she had learned to depend entirely on the providence of God. ² It reads less like a slogan than like the conclusion of someone who had been made to test it.