Saint Mary Magdalen Postel

She was born on November 28, 1756, at Barfleur, a fishing village on the Norman coast, and baptized Julie Françoise Catherine; Agasso says her parents were prosperous farmers. ² Robert Ellsberg describes Barfleur as a small town near Cherbourg. ³ She was educated by Benedictine nuns, and Domenico Agasso says it seemed for a time that she would become one of them. ²³

Instead she went home and opened a school for girls. ²³ Agasso explains what moved her: the scandalous number of girls condemned by poverty to ignorance. ² Her school taught reading, the catechism and household management, he writes, and quoting M. Odile Garrigou he gives its purpose, translated here from the Italian: "to raise Christian mothers and women able to make homes where it was pleasant to live." ² He adds, as the thing that marked it out, that her school had no punishments. ²

EWTN describes the Eucharist as the center of her devotion from an early age. ⁴ Ellsberg says that while she taught, she had privately dedicated herself to God. ³

The Revolution closed her school. ² When her parish priest went underground, Ellsberg writes, she put herself at his service and set up a secret chapel in her house, where clandestine services could be held. ³ Agasso says she kept the liturgical furnishings and books of the priests who had fled, and that the bishop charged her with keeping the Eucharist in her home and giving Communion herself in urgent cases. ² Avvenire adds that she sheltered hunted priests and helped them escape to England. ²

Ellsberg says she carried consecrated Hosts to the dying, and quotes the name Pius X later gave her: a veritable "maiden priest." ³ EWTN describes the same work, bringing Viaticum to the sick and dying when priests could not travel, and teaching children the faith in secret, at the risk of imprisonment or death. ⁴ Agasso adds that she organized clandestine Masses and trained groups of catechists for the time after the Revolution. ²

Avvenire says that in 1798 she became a Franciscan tertiary and took the name Mary Magdalen. ²

When the persecution eased, Ellsberg writes, she gave herself to repairing the local church, teaching religion, organizing prayer guilds and works of mercy. ³ In 1805, Avvenire says, she was given charge of a school at Cherbourg with three hundred children. ² Agasso has her open it with two companions and the help of Father Cabart. ²

By Ellsberg's account she decided in 1807 that what she wanted was to teach children, and that this needed a religious congregation; with the bishop's support, she and three others took vows as the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Mercy, and she became Mother Mary Magdalen. ³ Agasso dates the vows to 1806 or 1807 and calls the community the Daughters of Mercy, the name the Martyrology also uses. ¹² Its teaching, he says, followed the principles of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and EWTN says she used the rule of Saint John Baptist de La Salle. ²⁴

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908, in its article on the diocese of Coutances, gives a different origin: "the Sisters of Mercy of the Christian Schools, founded in 1802 at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte by the Venerable Sœur Postel." ⁵

The early years were poor. ¹³ Ellsberg says the community struggled for years in dire poverty, and that the bishop urged them to disband; Mother Mary Magdalen refused, and in time their fortunes turned. ³ The Martyrology remembers her as the one who founded and governed the congregation "in extreme poverty," in a translation of the Italian bishops' printing. ¹

After many moves the community settled at Tamerville, where, Agasso says, a workshop for women paying a regular wage stood beside the school without punishments. ² Then Rome asked that the institute have a motherhouse of its own. ² In 1832, Avvenire says, she bought a ruined Benedictine abbey at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte and made it the motherhouse; Agasso says the abbey was given to her. ²

She was then in her mid-seventies. ² EWTN says she led the rebuilding herself, often with her own hands, in spite of her age and her slender means. ⁴ Agasso adds that when Rome wanted the teaching sisters to be nurses as well, she agreed, and that she restored convents and churches and built new ones. ² Her masterpiece, in his judgment, was the sisters she formed with what he calls the pedagogy of the smile, even when she was exhausted by fasting and short nights. ²

Ellsberg quotes her own statement of what she wanted: "I want to teach the young and to inspire them with the love of God and liking for work. I want to help the poor and relieve them of some of their misery." ³

She died at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte on July 16, 1846, according to Avvenire, Ellsberg and EWTN; santiebeati's own heading gives July 14. ²³⁴ Ellsberg gives her age as eighty-nine, Avvenire as almost ninety, and Agasso as ninety. ²³ Agasso says she did not lose her smile even in death, and that people called her a saint at once. ² Her remains rest at Saint-Sauveur. ²

EWTN says the congregation received a decree of praise from Pius IX in 1859. ⁴ Writing in 1908, the encyclopedia called her Venerable. ⁵ Pius XI canonized her in 1925. ²³⁴ EWTN counts about four hundred of her sisters today. ⁴

EWTN names Saint Mary Magdalen Postel patron of Christian educators, of perseverance in adversity, of teachers and of the poor. ⁴ It is the only source used here that names a patronage. ⁴

Saint Mary Magdalen Postel's feast is July 16, the day of her death. ¹² The Roman Martyrology lists her that day in the territory of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, as the virgin who, when the priests were driven out, spent everything she had on the sick and the faithful, and afterward founded the Congregation of the Daughters of Mercy for the Christian formation of poor girls. ¹

During the Revolution she did what a layperson could do and a little more: kept the Sacrament, hid the priests, and brought Communion to people who were dying without them. ²³ Pius X's name for her, maiden priest, was meant as praise. ³

When the bishop told her community to disband, she kept it. ³ Its first years were spent in poverty, and the Martyrology still remembers that. ¹³

She was past seventy when she took on a ruined abbey. ²⁴ The school she ran had no punishments, and the sisters she trained learned to teach with a smile. ²

What she said she wanted was simple: to teach the young, to give them the love of God and a liking for work, and to relieve some of the misery of the poor. ³