Claudine Thévenet

Claudine Thévenet was born on 30 March 1774 in Lyon, in the Kingdom of France, into a family engaged in the city’s silk trade. She was the second of seven children of Philibert Thévenet and Marie-Antoinette Guyot and was raised in the Catholic faith in a city that was both a commercial centre and a stronghold of traditional piety. The collapse of the old order and the French Revolution reached Lyon with particular violence. After the city rose against the National Convention in 1793, republican forces recaptured it and carried out harsh reprisals. In 1794 two of Thévenet’s brothers were condemned and executed. Tradition holds that as they were taken to the guillotine they called on their sister to forgive their executioners. The episode, which she experienced in the context of the Terror in Lyon, remained a turning point in her spiritual life and in her later insistence on mercy and the care of those left destitute by political upheaval.

In the aftermath of the Revolution she devoted herself to charitable work among the poor of Lyon, especially abandoned and working-class girls. She associated with groups of laywomen who visited the imprisoned and the sick and who sought to restore religious instruction after years of dechristianization. About 1815 the priest André Coindre, who was organizing similar work for boys and who later founded the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, asked her to take charge of girls found in extreme want. She established a house of Providence in which the children received shelter, elementary education, catechesis, and training for work. From this apostolate a stable religious community took shape. In 1818 Thévenet and several companions formed the Congregation of the Religious of Jesus and Mary. She took the name Mary of Saint Ignatius (Marie de Saint-Ignace) and became the first superior of the institute.

The congregation’s purpose was the Christian education of girls, with a marked preference for the poor, though it also accepted pupils from other social conditions as the work developed. Its spirituality combined elements of Ignatian devotion—reflected in Thévenet’s religious name—with the Sacred Heart piety characteristic of early nineteenth-century French Catholicism. Under her government the sisters adopted a rule of life, obtained the support of the local church in Lyon, and opened further houses in the region. The early years were marked by material hardship, the need to train novices, and the ordinary difficulties of a new foundation in Restoration France. Coindre’s death in 1826 removed an important clerical protector, and Thévenet had to secure the congregation’s future without him.

Thévenet spent her remaining years in the government of the community and in the formation of its members. She endured a long and painful illness in her final period. She died in Lyon on 3 February 1837. After her death the Religious of Jesus and Mary continued to expand, eventually establishing schools and other educational works in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. The Catholic Church recognized her holiness in the late twentieth century: she was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 4 October 1981 and canonized by him on 21 March 1993. Her liturgical feast is kept on 3 February, the anniversary of her death.