FIGLIE DI MARIA. — Association of young women whose purpose is to honor the Most Blessed Virgin through particular practices of piety, to promote the personal sanctification of its members and apostolate in the family and society, according to the methods and statutes of its various branches.
ORIGINS. - More than one religious family has the merit of having gathered young women into a kind of Congregation in honor of Mary. In the fourteenth century there flourished in Ravenna, in the church of S. Maria in Porto, where the celebrated Madonna Greca was venerated, a mixed Confraternity of Sons and F. di M. The Memorie Portunisi (compiled in the fourteenth century from earlier documents: seventeenth-century copy in the Biblioteca Classense: A. Benini, La basilica rinascimentale di S. Maria in Porto e i suoi cimeli, Ravenna 1950, pp. 27-29) attribute its establishment to b. Pietro degli Onesti (de Honestis),
known as the Sinner, a regular canon of the twelfth century. This Confraternity soon became famous both for the status and for the number of its members. Distinguished persons, even emperors, enrolled in II. In 1290 its members numbered more than one hundred thousand.
In the seventeenth century another regular canon from Lorraine, f. Pietro Fourier (1565-1640), established a twofold association to preserve Marian devotion among young women; in 1620, with a special regulation, he founded the Congregation of secular or external Daughters, for the former pupils of the Canonesses regular whom he had founded; in 1631 he obtained from the diocesan bishop, for his parish of Mattaincourt, the approval of a Confraternity under the title of the Immaculate Conception. After Vespers on feast days, the association gathered former pupils aged fifteen and over in order to honor the Immaculate Virgin and listen to further instruction. The members wore as their distinctive insignia a sky-blue scapular, bearing on one side the image of the Immaculate Conception and on the other the inscription: « Mèria è stata concepita senza peccato ». It received the approval of the Holy See, but only for the monasteries of the Canonesses regular of Notre-Dame. Innocent X granted it numerous indulgences (cf. P.-J. Rogie, Histoire du bienh. Pierre Fourier, I, Verdun 1887, pp. 138-39; J.-B. Vuillemin, La vie de St Pierre Fourier, Parigi 1897, p. 305).
In the middle of the sixteenth century the Jesuit f. Giovanni Leone Flammingue, a professor at the Collegio Romano, formed among his pupils a Marian association having the same aims, approved in 1584 by Gregory XIII and subsequently honored with the title of Prima-Primaria. Three centuries later, following the example of the Jesuit title, the Dames du S. Cœur created the same association for the pupils of their boarding schools and, in 1832, for external ladies under the title of the Immaculate Conception.
A Congregation of F. di M. for young women in parishes is mentioned in the life of Marie-Rose (Eulalia Durocher, 1811-55; cf. P. Duchaussois, Rose du Canada, Montréal 1932, p. 103). This Congregation, the first in Canada, was canonically erected on 26 May 1842 by f. Telmon, O. M. I., and its first « superior » was none other than Durocher.
But all the associations mentioned were confined to a particular place or reserved for a specific religious Order, and did not achieve a vital and lasting development. The living Marian associations for women have their true beginnings in the nineteenth century.
1. F. di M. Immacolata. - Its origin is connected with the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to s. Caterina Labouré (1830) and is formulated by the Saint as follows: « One day I said: sig. Aladel [the nun’s spiritual director], the Blessed Virgin wishes you to begin an association of F. di M. You will be its founder and director. » Before 1830, in the houses of the Daughters of Charity, as at Providence on Rue Oudinot in Paris (1820) and, apparently, at S. Medardo and the Maddalena (cf. M. Chevalier, La médaille miraculeuse, Parigi 1878, pp. 340-41), associations of F.d.M. already existed, but they were isolated cases. The initiative and the Virgin’s desire, therefore, appeared as a heavenly invitation to organize and spread them. P. Aladel (1800-60) set to work.
The first association was erected in the parish of St-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou in Paris (8 Sept. 1837). The groups multiplied rapidly. Ten years later (1848), a rescript of Pius IX permanently granted the superior general of the Priests of the Mission the faculty to erect the association in all schools for young women directed by the Daughters of Charity, with all the indulgences granted to the Marian Congregation Prima-Primaria of the Collegio Romano. This favor was later extended to poor boys (1850), young women in general (1876), and parishes that submitted a request (1931). The first manual (1848), which remained substantially unchanged until our own day (latest ed. 1948), provides precise directions on the functioning and organization of the association. The Annales des Enfants de Marie, replaced in 1919 by the monthly periodical Rayons as the central organ, in various editions for the different classes of Daughters, together with a large number of national and regional bulletins (in Italy, Maria nostra luce, Torino from 1894), keep alive the spirit, initiatives, and aims of the association: to honor and cause others to honor Mary Immaculate, personal sanctification, and the exercise of a true and active apostolate. The Daughters have their own central and peripheral organization. In some places they are diocesan and national in character and form the lively core of the leaders of Catholic Action, in its common and specialized forms. The association established its first branches in Italy in the middle of the last century. In Rome the first was established in the parish of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini in 1862. From this arose the Pia Unione delle F. di M. (v. sotto), which was brought into being in 1864, under the direction of the parish priest of S. Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, f. Passeri, by the marchesa Costanza Lepri, a Figlia di M. of S. Giovanni de' Fiorentini, together with several other members. Lepri had opened a school for young women near the church of S. Agnese and wished to establish the association among them. The Pia Unione, authorized by the director of the Figlie di S. Giovanni de' Fiorentini and organized according to the same methods, manual, statutes, and regulations, subsequently became established 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 apportati dall'Associazione delle Figlie... in Roma nei primi 25 anni dalla fondazione, Roma 1887, p. 7). According to the 1948 statistics, the Daughters numbered 500,000 members, distributed among 5,000 centers.
2. F. di M. Immacolata Ausiliatrice. - Their origin goes back to s. Giovanni Bosco, who wished that, for young women as for young men, an association should be established in which they would find the necessary means to be formed in purity and the apostolate.
From the first years of the second religious family (1877), while the Founder and the cofoundress, madre M. Dom. Mazzarello, « l'esemplare Figlia di M. » (Pius XI), were still living, various attempts were made to establish such an association.
But the idea was implemented only during the administration of his successor, d. Michele Rua, who officially established it at Valdocco (Torino) on 8 December 1895, incorporating it into the archconfraternity of the devotees of Maria Ausiliatrice. In the following years it grew rapidly, especially through the efforts of the servant of God d. 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 erect it canonically in the institute’s houses. In 1945 the Daughters numbered 294 centers and approximately 100,000 members.
3. Pious Union of the Daughters of Mary
After the apparitions of the Most Blessed Virgin to St. Catherine Labouré (1830) and the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854), Marian associations sprang up in various places. At the suggestion and on the initiative of Marchioness Costanza Lepri, the parish priest of S. Agnese outside the walls of Rome, Fr. Alberto Passeri, later Abbot General of the Lateran Canons Regular, founded on 23 January 1864 an association of Daughters modeled on, and governed by the regulations of, the one already existing in the house of the Daughters of Charity at S. Giovanni de' Fiorentini (of which Lepri was a member), but with a parish character. Taking advantage, moreover, of the fact that the titular saint of his church was the Roman young woman venerated throughout the world, Fr. Passèri obtained that the Association be erected under the title of «Pious Union of the Daughters of Mary under the patronage of the Immaculate Virgin and of St. Agnes, virgin and martyr» (30 September 1864).Fr. Passèri also partially modified the original regulations, incorporating them into his Manuale delle F. di M., which subsequently went through 47 editions. Pius IX enriched it with special indulgences by apostolic letters and, by a brief of 16 February 1866, raised it to the rank of primary association; then, on 4 February 1870, he transferred to the Abbot General of the Lateran Canons Regular the faculty of aggregating to it other canonically erected associations of Daughters of Mary that might request this.
There have always been very numerous requests for aggregation to the Primary Association of S. Agnese, in order to share in its privileges, and today (1930) they number approximately 13,000.
In 1897, the Sacred Congregation of Indulgences established and endowed with indulgences, for all aggregated Daughters of Mary, a special medal to be worn as an insignia.
What characterized the Pious Union of the Daughters of Mary of S. Agnese from its very beginning, besides devotion to the Roman Martyr, was its universality. The other Marian Congregations at that time either did not bear the title of Daughters of Mary or were, in fact, established predominantly for the benefit of males, with preference given to students or young men of the upper classes, as was the celebrated Congregation of the «Scaletta»; or, if they bore this title, they were reserved exclusively for young women living in institutes directed by religious women. The Primary Association of S. Agnese, on the other hand, immediately acquired a popular and parish character.
The individual Pious Associations, moreover, are completely autonomous while remaining entirely dependent on the Ordinary, who, without altering the essence of the institution, may give them whatever statutes he judges most suitable for attaining the purpose intended in the foundation of the Primary Association; after aggregation, they maintain with it only a moral union.
FIGLIE DI MARIA (St-Denis de la Réunion). — Religious congregation founded at Rivière des Pluies (Island of Réunion) on 19 May 1849; on the 27th of the same month it received government authorization by a decree of Napoleon III. On 28 January 1891, with the decree of praise, it entered the ranks of religious institutes of pontifical right, and on 16 December 1901 it was approved by Leo XIII.
The Congregation was founded to catechize the enslaved women transferred to that colony for purposes of exploitation. Once the original ideal had disappeared with the official abolition of slavery, the religious devoted themselves to schools, orphans, abandoned persons, and the sick in hospitals and in their homes, in the mission fields where the Congregation was born and continues to flourish.
The constitutions were approved for the first time on 3 July 1934, and then definitively on 13 December 1948.
The religious number 273 in 48 houses.