Saint Julie Billiart

She was born on July 12, 1751, at Cuvilly, in Picardy, the sixth of seven children of Jean-François Billiart and Marie-Louise-Antoinette Debraine. ¹ Franciscan Media calls the family well-to-do farmers. ³ Her schooling went no further than the village school kept by her uncle, but the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia says that at seven she knew the catechism by heart and gathered other children to hear them recite it. ¹ The parish priest let her make her First Communion and be confirmed at nine. ¹

When she was sixteen the family fell on hard times, and she went to work in the fields with the reapers. ¹³ She still found time to teach the catechism, Franciscan Media says, to children and to the farm laborers. ³ The encyclopedia says that people took to calling her "the saint of Cuvilly." ¹

Then came the shot. The encyclopedia says that when she was twenty-two a pistol was fired at her father "by some unknown enemy," and that the shock brought on a paralysis of the legs which, within a few years, left her bedridden. ¹ Loyola Press dates the shot to 1774 and says the bullet missed. ⁴ Franciscan Media speaks of "an attempt to wound or even kill her father," and puts the onset of her illness at about thirty. ³

She lay paralyzed for about twenty-two years. ¹³ The encyclopedia says that in that time she received Communion daily and spent four or five hours a day in contemplation, and that she made linens and lace for the altar. ¹ She kept teaching: the village children gathered around her bed, and she gave particular care to those preparing for their First Communion. ¹³ Visitors came, Franciscan Media says, because they had heard she was holy. ³

In 1790, Loyola Press says, a priest who had sworn loyalty to the Revolution took over the church at Cuvilly. ⁴ Julie would not receive him and persuaded the whole village to stay away from him. ⁴ Loyola Press quotes a letter of hers to a friend on the subject. People who could not reach their lawful pastors, she wrote, would not be punished for it: "God will send an angel from heaven to them rather than allow them to perish forever." ⁴

She had to leave. Franciscan Media says she was smuggled out of Cuvilly in a haycart and hidden for several years at Compiègne, moved from house to house, and that for a time she lost the power of speech. ³ Loyola Press also has her flee in a hay wagon. ⁴ The encyclopedia says only that she took refuge at Amiens with Countess Baudoin "during the troublesome times of the French Revolution." ¹ Franciscan Media places a vision in these years: Calvary surrounded by women in religious habits, and a voice saying, "Behold these spiritual daughters whom I give you in an institute marked by the cross." ³

At Amiens she met Françoise Blin de Bourdon, Viscountess of Gizaincourt, who had been imprisoned with her family in the Terror and escaped death only by the fall of Robespierre. ¹ The encyclopedia says that at first she was not drawn to "the almost speechless paralytic," but came to love and admire her. ¹ Other young women gathered around Julie's couch for a time, then drifted away, until only Françoise was left. ¹ Loyola Press says the two went to Bettencourt and taught the catechism there until the whole village returned to the practice of the faith. ⁴

In 1803, at the bidding of Father Joseph Varin and under the Bishop of Amiens, the two founded the Institute of Notre Dame, whose first object was the salvation of poor children. ¹² The first pupils were eight orphans. ¹² On June 1, 1804, the feast of the Sacred Heart, Julie was cured of her paralysis after a novena made in obedience to her confessor. ¹ Loyola Press tells it differently: during a novena a priest urged her to take a step in faith, and she was healed on the spot. ⁴ Franciscan Media says she walked that year for the first time in twenty-two years. ³ On October 15, 1804, she, Françoise and two others made their first vows. ¹²

The congregation was approved by imperial decree on June 19, 1806, with thirty members. ¹ Julie did away with the old distinction between choir sisters and lay sisters, so that there was only one rank of religious. ¹² The sisters' first object was the poor, but the 1911 article on the institute says the need for Christian education in France led the founders to open schools for the rich as well, under an unwritten rule that a mission may have free schools without pay schools, but never pay schools without free ones. ²³

The encyclopedia calls what came next the greatest sorrow of her life. ¹ While Father Varin was away, the community's confessor at Amiens, the Abbé de Sambucy de St. Estève, tried to remake its rule along the lines of the old monastic orders, and won over the bishop. ¹ Julie had to leave the diocese. ¹ She told her sisters they were free to stay or follow her, and all but two followed. ¹ In the middle of the winter of 1809, the convent at Namur, whose bishop had invited her, became the motherhouse, and it still was when the encyclopedia was written. ¹² The Bishop of Amiens later asked her to come back, and she tried, but she found neither recruits nor money and returned to Namur. ¹

Between 1804 and 1816 she founded fifteen convents and made a hundred and twenty journeys, many of them long and hard, while writing constantly to her sisters; hundreds of the letters were kept at the motherhouse. ¹ Loyola Press says the fifteen were spread throughout France. ⁴ The encyclopedia article on the institute says that her French foundations were all temporary and lists the permanent ones in Belgium, among them Namur, Jumet, Ghent and Gembloux. ² Franciscan Media says her schools served the poor and the wealthy alike. ³

She fell ill in January 1816 and died on April 8 after three months of pain, which the encyclopedia says she bore in silence, "with the Magnificat on her lips." ¹ Françoise succeeded her as superior general. ² The 1911 article records that a later superior general sent the first sisters to America, where the first foundation was made at Cincinnati at the request of its bishop, John B. Purcell. ²

The encyclopedia gives the saying that was "continually on her lips and pen": "Oh, qu'il est bon, le bon Dieu," how good God is. ¹ Paul VI, in the French of his canonization homily, gave it as "Comme est bon le bon Dieu!" and called it the exclamation that summed her up. ⁵ The Bishop of Ghent, Monsignor de Broglie, said of her, by the encyclopedia's account, that she saved more souls by her inner life of union with God than by her outward work. ¹

Pius X declared her Blessed on May 13, 1906, after a process begun in 1881, and Paul VI canonized her on June 22, 1969. ¹⁵ In the Italian part of the homily, translated here, he said that a miracle remains a sign of holiness but is not its essence. ⁵ In the French, he named as the mark to be kept by her sisters, in translation, "the religious instruction and Christian education of girls, especially the poor," and he named the Sisters of Notre Dame of Amersfoort and of Coesfeld, as well as those of Namur, as her daughters. ⁵

None of the sources used for this page names a patronage for Saint Julie Billiart, and none is given here. ¹³⁴⁵ Paul VI commended her to the congregations that grew from hers, for the work of teaching the faith to the young. ⁵

Saint Julie Billiart's feast is April 8, the day she died at Namur in 1816. ¹³⁴ Franciscan Media and Loyola Press both give that date. ³⁴

For twenty-two years she could not walk, and she did what could be done from a bed: she prayed for hours, sewed for the altar, and taught the children who came to her. ¹ Franciscan Media remarks that her immobility "in no way impeded her activities." ³ The healing came late, and the work she is remembered for came after it, but the sources are clear that the bedridden years were not empty ones. ¹³

She lost the house she had built at Amiens to a confessor who wanted to change its rule, and she let her sisters choose for themselves whether to follow her. ¹ Almost all of them did. ¹ When the bishop who had pushed her out asked her back, she went, and it did not work. ¹

Paul VI warned against confusing holiness with the miraculous, and the story of her cure is the part of her life the sources tell least alike. ¹⁴⁵ What they agree on is the work: schools for poor girls first, and the training of teachers to go wherever they were asked. ¹²⁵

The phrase she repeated is the one most often remembered: how good God is. ¹⁵ She said it through paralysis, exile, and the loss of her first house.