Marie Eugénie of Jesus, Servant of God

MARIA EUGENIA di Gesù, serva di Dio. - Anne Eugénie Milleret de Brou, foundress of the Institute of the Sisters of the Assumption, b. at Metz on 25 Aug. 1817, d. at Auteuil (Paris) on 10 March 1898. Recalled to a more living faith and piety by the preaching of Fr. D. Lacordaire, she met in 1837 with the abbé M. T. Combalot, who judged her suited to the foundation he was contemplating of a congregation that would devote itself to the education of young women. M. E., although terrified, consented, and after a kind of brief novitiate at the Visitation of Côte-St-André (Dauphiné), she returned to Paris and with other young women began the novitiate on 30 Apr. 1839, thus founding the new Congregation, which, under the motto Adveniat regnum tuum, aimed especially at educating the girls of the liberal aristocracy of that time, who hated religion or showed themselves indifferent to it. For this reason the sisters had to graft their spiritual formation onto a solid intellectual culture, and therefore, besides having a good command of the particular subjects to be taught, they had to know Latin, Holy Scripture, and dogmatic and moral theology well. Difficulties and trials were not lacking as a seal upon the work of God; they were transformed into joy, however, with the definitive approval of the Institute in 1888.