Catherine du Verdier de La Sorinière

Catherine du Verdier de La Sorinière was a French Catholic laywoman and martyr of the French Revolution, counted among the Blessed Martyrs of Angers. She was born on 29 June 1758 at Saint-Pierre-de-Chemillé in Anjou, in what is now the department of Maine-et-Loire. She belonged to a family of the provincial nobility associated with the estate of La Sorinière near Chemillé. Her mother was Marie de La Dive, later known as the widow du Verdier de La Sorinière, who was herself put to death for the faith in 1794 and later beatified with her daughters. Catherine remained unmarried and lived a devout Catholic life in the rural society of late eighteenth-century Anjou, a region that would shortly become one of the principal theatres of the Wars of the Vendée.

The Revolution imposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and an oath that divided the French Church. Anjou and the neighbouring Vendée rose in 1793 in defence of refractory priests, traditional worship, and local custom. After the republican reconquest, the Reign of Terror in the West was especially harsh. In Angers, revolutionary tribunals and military commissions condemned large numbers of clergy and laity accused of “fanaticism,” of sheltering non-juring priests, or of sympathy with the Catholic and royalist cause. It was in this climate that members of the du Verdier de La Sorinière family were arrested.

In January 1794 Catherine’s mother, Marie de La Dive, was taken to the Champ des Martyrs at Avrillé, just outside Angers, and shot on 26 January. Her sister Marie-Louise du Verdier de La Sorinière was executed at the same place on 27 January. Catherine herself was condemned by the revolutionary authorities in Angers and guillotined in the city on 1 February 1794, at about thirty-five years of age. Hagiographical tradition and the later beatification process treat these deaths as martyrdom in odium fidei: the victims were killed for their fidelity to the Catholic Church rather than for any ordinary criminal or purely political offence in the modern sense.

Catherine is one of the ninety-nine martyrs of Angers beatified by Pope John Paul II on 19 February 1984. The group includes priests, a few religious, and a large majority of lay people—many of them women—from the diocese of Angers who were executed in 1793–1794. Their memory is kept in that diocese and at the sanctuary of the Champ des Martyrs in Avrillé, where those shot by firing squad are especially commemorated. Catherine’s own liturgical memorial is associated with 1 February, the day of her death, within the wider commemoration of the Angers martyrs.