OULTREMONT, EMILIE de. — In religion, Maria di Gesù, foundress of the Society of Mary Reparatrix, born in the castle of Wégimont (Liège) on 11 Oct. 1818, died in Florence on 22 Feb. 1878.
After a childhood centered on Eucharistic practice, she married at the age of nineteen Baron Victor de Hooghvorst, by whom she had two sons and two daughters. Widowed in 1847, she conceived the plan, clarified by a revelation of Mary (8 Dec. 1854), to found a religious congregation that would have for her divine Son a most tender and reverent devotion. Thus arose the new Society of Mary Reparatrix in Paris on 11 Oct. 1855, with four companions united to the foundress and with perpetual, and in part nocturnal, adoration. The Institute soon flourished with vocations, including the two daughters of the foundress, and, after the community was transferred from Paris to Strasbourg (1857), foundations began: Madurai Mission (1859), Toulouse (1860), London (1862), Tournai (1863), St-Denis on the island of Réunion (1863), Rome (1865), Port Louis (1866), Liège (1866), Paris (1869), Nantes and Le Mans (1871), Brussels (1872), Pau and Seville (1874), Córdoba (1875). Oultremont, as superior general, never ceased to strongly encourage the interior formation of her daughters, herself illumined and tried by extraordinary phenomena. The Society was approved on 27 June 1864, and its Constitutions on 15 March 1873.