Saint Marguerite Bays

She was born on September 8, 1815, at La Pierra, a hamlet of the parish of Siviriez in the canton of Fribourg, the second of seven children of a modest farming family. ⁴⁵¹⁰ Vatican News and L'Osservatore Romano spell the hamlet La Pierraz. ²⁸ Clairval Abbey names her parents as Antoine and Joséphine Bays, and says she was baptized the day after her birth. ¹⁰

The sources do not agree on the order of her first sacraments. L'Osservatore Romano says she was confirmed at eight and made her First Communion at eleven; Clairval dates her First Communion to 1823 and her Confirmation to 1826. ⁸¹⁰ At about fifteen she was apprenticed as a seamstress, the trade she followed all her life. ²⁸ Lively and cheerful, she was also drawn to solitude and prayer, and her family expected her to become a nun; she did not hear that call, and stayed in the world, single and chaste. ⁵¹⁰

Clairval describes her days: up before three in the morning, spinning hemp, then walking a kilometer and a half to Mass at Siviriez, then out to work in other people's houses, where she met mothers with all kinds of troubles. ¹⁰ The Mass, the Foundation says, was the highlight of her day. ⁵

She stayed in her father's house and did the housework there. ⁵¹⁰ When her elder brother married, his wife, Josette, humiliated her and, according to Clairval, called her lazy; Vatican News says Josette had been a maid in the house and did not understand Marguerite's life of prayer. ²¹⁰ Marguerite bore it in silence, and when Josette fell ill young and was dying, Marguerite was the only person she would let near her. ²⁵¹⁰

There was more. Her sister Marie-Marguerite came home after the failure of her marriage. Her brother Joseph, a bachelor of violent temper, served a short prison sentence. Her eldest brother, Claude, had a son out of wedlock, and Marguerite urged him to recognize the boy and brought him up herself. ²⁵¹⁰ Only her brother Jean, the Foundation says, really understood her inner life. ⁵ She did not condemn any of them, and Clairval says all of them ended their lives as good Christians. ⁵¹⁰

She joined the Franciscan Third Order, now the Secular Franciscan Order. Vatican News dates her entry to 1860; Clairval says she joined at twenty, and the Foundation that she was received at Romont. ²⁵¹⁰ She taught catechism to the children, visited the sick and cared for the poor, people Vatican News says she thought of as "God's favorites". ² She sewed clothes for poor children without payment, and on Sundays walked them to the chapel of Notre-Dame du Bois, where they prayed and then played in the woods; they called her "godmother". ⁴⁵¹⁰

Every Christmas she built a Nativity scene for the children of the neighborhood, and the diocese remembers how they came running to see it. ⁴¹⁰ Clairval adds that she brought into the parish the Holy Childhood, the work founded to help poor children in mission lands. ¹⁰ To people who brought her their troubles she gave the same advice, which the Foundation quotes from a witness: "Pray your rosary, you will see that it will be better afterwards." ⁵ She walked to the shrine of Our Lady at Einsiedeln several times, a journey of 242 kilometers by the Foundation's reckoning and 200 by Clairval's, which says she made it eleven times. ⁵¹⁰

In 1853 she was operated on for intestinal cancer. ²⁸ The treatment, L'Osservatore Romano says, dismayed her, and she begged the Virgin Mary either to heal her or to let her suffer in a way that shared in the Passion. ⁸ By December 1854, Clairval says, she lay dying, and the doctor had given up hope. ¹⁰

On December 8, 1854, the day Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in Rome, she was cured. ²⁸¹⁰ Clairval says her family came home from Mass to find her sitting up by the stove, radiant. ¹⁰ The Foundation's English page dates the cure to September 8 while naming the same proclamation, which fell in December. ⁵

After the cure the wounds of the crucified Christ appeared on her hands, feet and chest. ²⁸ Clairval says nobody knows exactly when, and the Secular Franciscans say she bore them for nineteen years. ⁹¹⁰ On Fridays, at about three in the afternoon, she would fall into an ecstasy, and through Holy Week, L'Osservatore Romano says, she relived the Passion from Gethsemane to Calvary. ⁸¹⁰ She tried to keep it hidden, wearing mittens over her hands, but the news got out. ²¹⁰

In 1873 the bishop of Fribourg sent a committee of a lawyer, a doctor and two priests to examine her during one of these Friday ecstasies. ¹⁰ The doctor, Clairval says, had been chosen from among the skeptics so that nobody could suspect partiality. He pricked her with a needle and she felt nothing, and he saw the wounds, including the one near her heart. ¹⁰ When she came to she declared herself very well and drank a glass of wine with them, and the baffled doctor said, "It is an extraordinary thing, one is compelled to believe." ¹⁰

Cardinal Kurt Koch, in a homily on her that the Foundation publishes, said that holiness for her had nothing to do with heroics or sensation, "nor even with the stigmata that she was careful to hide from the curious". ⁷

By 1879 she could no longer get up or eat. ¹⁰ She died at home on June 27, 1879, at three in the afternoon. ⁵⁸ L'Osservatore Romano says she died, as she had wished, "on the feast of the Sacred Heart"; the Foundation and Clairval say it was during the octave of that feast. ⁵⁶⁸¹⁰ The Foundation says the church was as full as on a feast day, and that after the burial the gravedigger said, "we have buried a saint". ⁵

John Paul II beatified her on October 29, 1995. ²⁸ The cure that opened the way to her canonization, recognized by the Vatican in January 2019, was that of a little girl run over by a tractor in 1998: Clairval names her as Virginie, twenty-two months old, whose grandfather had been praying to Marguerite for his grandchildren, and says the doctors found no injury beyond a few bruises. ⁹¹⁰ Pope Francis canonized her on October 13, 2019, together with John Henry Newman and three others. ¹⁹

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ²⁵⁸¹⁰ The Secular Franciscans remember her as known in her region for helping the poor, domestic servants and orphans. ⁹

Her feast is June 27, the anniversary of her death. ³⁵ The Diocese of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg called June 27 her liturgical feast when it moved her relics into a new reliquary in the church of Siviriez on June 24, 2021, shortly before the day. ³ The parish of Siviriez also keeps the 27th of every month as an afternoon of adoration, confession and prayer for the sick, chosen, the Foundation explains, because she died on the 27th. ⁶

Most of her life was spent in one house with people who did not make it easy, and she did not leave. ²⁵ Clairval credits her patience with bringing all of them back to the faith in the end. ¹⁰ That took years, and she went on keeping house, sewing and nursing for them the whole time it had not happened. ⁵¹⁰

The extraordinary things in her life, the cure and the wounds, are what drew the crowds and the bishop's commission. ¹⁰ She hid them as well as she could, and Cardinal Koch said holiness for her lay in the "simple, neutral everydayness" of love for Christ and for her neighbor. ⁷

Pope Francis set her beside three religious women and a cardinal, and said what was particular to her: she was a seamstress, and her holiness was the holiness of daily life. ¹

For the children of Siviriez she was a godmother with a Nativity scene and a game in the woods after prayers. ⁴⁵¹⁰ For the people who came to her door she had one answer most days, which was to pray the rosary. ⁵