FIGLIE DI MARIA

DAUGHTERS OF MARY. – An association of young people, whose purpose is to honor the Blessed Virgin through particular practices of piety, to promote the personal sanctification of its members, and to foster family and social apostolate, according to the methods and statutes of the various branches.

ORIGINS. – More than one religious family has the merit of having gathered young people into a kind of congregation in honor of Mary. In the 14th century, a mixed confraternity of Sons and Daughters of Mary flourished in Ravenna, at the church of Santa Maria in Porto, where the famous Madonna Greca was venerated. The *Memorie Portuensi* (compiled in the 14th century from earlier documents; a 17th-century copy is preserved in the Biblioteca Classense; cf. A. Benini, *La basilica rinascimentale di S. Maria in Porto e i suoi cimeli*, Ravenna 1950, pp. 27-29) attribute its institution to the Blessed Pietro degli Onesti (de Honestis), known as the Peccatore, a 12th-century canon regular. This confraternity soon became famous both for the quality and number of its members, including illustrious figures—even emperors—who enrolled in II. By 1290, its membership exceeded one hundred thousand.

In the 17th century, another canon regular from Lorraine, St. Peter Fourier (1565-1640), established a twofold sodality to foster Marian piety among young women. In 1620, with a special regulation, he expanded the Congregation of Secular or External Daughters of Mary, intended for the former pupils of the canonesses regular he had founded. In 1637, he obtained diocesan approval from the bishop of Mattaincourt for a confraternity under the title of the Immaculate Conception. The association gathered, after Vespers on feast days, young women aged fifteen and older to honor the Immaculate Virgin and receive instruction. The members wore as a badge a light blue scapular bearing on one side the image of the Immaculate Conception and on the other the inscription: *"Maria was conceived without sin."* The association received approval from the Holy See, though only for the monasteries of the canonesses regular of Notre-Dame. Innocent X granted it numerous indulgences (cf. P.-J. Rogie, *Histoire du bienf. Pierre Fourier*, I, Verdun 1887, pp. 138-39; J.-B. Vuillemin, *La vie de st Pierre Fourier*, Paris 1897, p. 305).

In the mid-16th century, Fr. Giovanni Leone Flammingue, a professor at the Roman College, formed among his students a Marian association with similar aims. It was approved in 1584 by Gregory XIII and later honored with the title of *Prima-Primaria*. Three centuries later, following the example of the Jesuit title, the Dames du Sacré-Cœur created a similar association for their pupils, and in 1832 extended it to external ladies under the title of the Immaculate Conception.

A mention of a Congregation of Daughters of Mary for young women in parishes is found in the life of Marie-Rose (Eulalia Durocher, 1811-55; cf. P. Duchaussois, *Rose du Canada*, Montreal 1932, p. 103). This congregation, the first in Canada, was canonically erected on May 26, 1842, by Fr. Telmon, O.M.I., and its first "superior" was Durocher herself.

Yet all the associations mentioned were confined to a particular place or reserved for a specific religious order and did not achieve lasting vitality. The living Marian associations for women have their true beginnings in the 19th century.

**I. DAUGHTERS OF MARY OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.** – The origin of this association is linked to the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to St. Catherine Labouré in 1830. The Virgin’s words to her are recorded as follows: *"One day I said: Mr. Aladel [the spiritual director of the nun], the Blessed Virgin wants you to begin an association of Daughters of Mary. You will be its founder and director."* Before 1830, in the houses of the Daughters of Charity—such as in Paris at the Providence on Rue Oudinot (1820) and, it seems, at Saint-Médard and La Madeleine (cf. M. Chevalier, *La médaille miraculeuse*, Paris 1878, pp. 340-41)—there already existed isolated associations of Daughters of Mary. The task was to organize and spread this initiative, and the Virgin’s desire appeared as a heavenly invitation. Fr. Aladel (1800-69) set to work.

The first association was erected in the parish of Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou in Paris on September 8, 1837. Groups multiplied rapidly. Ten years later (1848), a rescript of Pius IX granted the Superior General of the Priests of the Mission the perpetual faculty to erect the association in all schools for young girls directed by the Daughters of Charity, with all the indulgences granted to the *Prima-Primaria* Marian Congregation of the Roman College. This favor was later extended to poor children (1850), to young women in general (1876), and to parishes that requested it (1931). The first manual (1848), which has remained substantially unchanged to this day (latest ed. 1948), provides precise instructions on the functioning and organization of the association. The *Annales des Enfants de Marie*, replaced since 1919 by the monthly periodical *Rayons* as the central organ in various editions for different classes of Daughters, along with numerous national and regional bulletins (in Italy, *Maria nostra luce*, Turin, since 1894), keep alive the spirit, initiatives, and aims of the association: to honor and promote the honor of the Immaculate Mary, personal sanctification, and the exercise of true and effective apostolate. The Daughters have their own central and peripheral organization. In some places, they are organized on a diocesan or national level and form the core of leaders for Catholic Action, both in its general and specialized forms. The association first spread to Italy in the mid-19th century. In Rome, the first branch was established in the parish of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in 1862. From this initiative arose the Pia Unione delle Figlie di Maria (see below), which was founded in 1864 under the direction of Fr. Passeri, parish priest of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura in Rome, by Costanza Lepri, a Daughter of Mary from San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, together with several other associates. Lepri had opened a school for young women near the church of Sant’Agnese and wished to establish the association among them. The Pia Unione, authorized by the director of the Daughters of Saint John the Florentine and organized according to the same methods, manuals, statutes, and regulations, subsequently gained prominence in the parishes, was honored with the title of *Primaria*, and became one of the most important branches of the association (cf. C. Uttini, *Relazione succinta dei vantaggi opportuni dall’Associazione delle Figlie... in Roma nei primi 25 anni dalla fondazione*, Rome 1887, p. 7). According to the 1948 statistics, the Daughters number 500,000 members distributed across 5,000 centers.

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**2. DAUGHTERS OF MARY, HELP OF CHRISTIANS.** – Their origin dates to St. John Bosco, who desired that, as there was for young men, a sodality be established for young women where they might find the means to be formed in purity and apostolate.

From the earliest years of the second religious family (1877), while the Founder and the co-foundress, Mother Maria Domenica Mazzarello—"the exemplary Daughter of Mary" (Pius XI)—were still alive, various attempts were made to establish such an association.

But the idea was only put into practice during the governorship of his successor, Bl. MICHELE RUA, who on 8 December 1895 officially established it at Valdocco (Turin), grafted onto the Archconfraternity of Devotees of Mary Help of Christians. In the following years it grew rapidly, especially through the efforts of the Servant of God Filippo Rinaldi. It had its own regulations, medal and banner. By a rescript of 8 December 1941 the Holy See granted the Rector Major of the Salesians the faculty to canonically erect it in the houses of the Institute. By 1945 the Daughters numbered 294 centres and about 100,000 members.

3. Pia Unione delle Figlie di Maria — After the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to St Catherine Labouré (1830) and the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854), Marian associations sprang up in many places. At the suggestion and initiative of the Marchioness Costanza Lepri, the parish priest of S. Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, Fr Alberto Passeri (later General Abbot of the Canons Regular of the Lateran), founded on 23 January 1864 an association of Daughters on the model and with the regulations of the one already existing in the house of the Daughters of Charity at S. Giovanni de’ Fiorentini (of which the Marchioness was a member), but with a parochial character. Noting that the titular saint of his church was the young Roman virgin venerated throughout the world, Fr Passeri obtained that the Association be erected under the title “Pia Unione delle Figlie di Maria under the patronage of the Immaculate Virgin and St Agnes virgin and martyr” (30 September 1864).

Fr Passeri also partly revised the original regulations, incorporating them into a Manual of the Daughters of Mary which subsequently ran to 47 editions. Pius IX, in apostolic letters, granted special indulgences and, by a brief of 15 February 1866, raised it to the rank of a primary union, later transferring on 4 February 1870 to the General Abbot of the Canons Regular of the Lateran the faculty of aggregating other canonically erected Daughters of Mary associations that requested II.
Requests for aggregation to the Primaria of S. Agnese have always been extremely numerous, so that by 1930 they reached the figure of about 13,000, in order to share in its privileges.

The Sacred Congregation of Indulgences in 1897 fixed and granted to all aggregated Daughters of Mary a special medal to be worn as a badge.

What characterised, from its very beginning, the Pia Unione delle Figlie di Maria of S. Agnese was, besides devotion to the Roman martyr, its universality. Other Marian congregations at the time either lacked the title “Daughters of Mary” or were in fact predominantly erected for the benefit of men with preference for students and young men of the upper classes, as was the celebrated “Scaletta” Congregation; or, if they bore this title, they were reserved exclusively to young women living in institutes run by religious. The Primaria of S. Agnese, instead, immediately took on a popular and parochial character.

The individual Pia Associations are then completely autonomous while remaining entirely subject to the Ordinary, who, without prejudice to the essence of the institution, may give them whatever statutes he judges most suitable for attaining the end intended in the foundation of the Primaria, with which they maintain, after aggregation, only a moral union.

FIGLIE DI MARIA (St-Denis de la Réunion). — A religious congregation founded at Rivière des Pluies (Island of Réunion) on 19 May 1849; on 27 May of the same year it received government authorisation through a decree of Napoleon III. On 28 January 1891, by decree of Jode, it entered the sphere of religions of pontifical right, and on 16 December 1901 it was approved by Leo XIII.

The Congregation had arisen to catechise the enslaved women transferred to that colony for exploitation. When the original ideal faded with the official abolition of slavery, the sisters turned to schools, orphans, the abandoned, the sick in hospitals and to missionary work in the fields where the Congregation has been active.

The constitutions were first approved in July 1934 and then definitively on 13 December 1948. The sisters number 273 in 48 houses.

FIGLIE DI MARIA, also called SUORE DI SANTA FRANCESCA ROMANA. — A religious institute founded at Louvres in France in 1841 through the efforts of the Jesuit priests Fuollet and Robin, who based the formation of the first group of members on the rule of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Cenacle, from which the Institute separated and took autonomous life in 1858. The sisters care for working youth in factories, establishments and workshops, as well as for the sick at home. It was approved by the Holy See in 1936 and now has 25 houses with over 200 sisters.

SILVERIO MATTEI