Émilie Gamelin

Marie-Émilie-Eugène Tavernier was born on 19 February 1800 in Montreal, then in Lower Canada, the youngest of fifteen children of Antoine Tavernier and Marie-Josephte Maurice. She lost her mother at the age of four and her father at fourteen and was thereafter raised by an aunt. In a city marked by poverty, seasonal unemployment, and recurrent disease, the young Émilie developed a lifelong habit of visiting the poor in their homes and the inmates of the Montreal prison, to whom she brought food, clothing, and spiritual consolation.

On 4 June 1823 she married Jean-Baptiste Gamelin, a well-to-do Montreal merchant and apple grower who was much older than she. Three sons were born of the marriage; all died in early childhood. Jean-Baptiste Gamelin died in 1827, leaving Émilie a widow at twenty-seven. Rather than remarry, she turned her house into a refuge for aged and infirm women and intensified her charitable rounds. By the early 1830s she had established a more formal shelter, known as the Yellow House, and had drawn other laywomen into an organized work of mercy that assisted widows, orphans, the unemployed, and victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832.

The need for a stable religious congregation to perpetuate this apostolate was recognized by Ignace Bourget, bishop of Montreal. With his support, Émilie Gamelin founded in 1843 the community that became the Sisters of Providence, originally called the Daughters of Charity, Servants of the Poor, following a rule inspired by Saint Vincent de Paul. She was appointed the first superior. After receiving the habit, she and her first companions professed religious vows in 1844. Under her leadership the sisters opened asylums for the elderly and for orphaned children, assumed care of female prisoners, and began schools and infirmaries. They also nursed Irish immigrants stricken with typhus in the late 1840s and responded to later outbreaks of cholera.

Mother Gamelin governed a still-poor and rapidly growing institute through political unrest and repeated public-health crises. She traveled to seek material help and to study established communities of charity in the United States. In September 1851, while personally attending cholera patients in Montreal, she contracted the disease and died on 23 September 1851 at the age of fifty-one. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 7 October 2001. The Sisters of Providence subsequently spread across Canada, the United States, and Latin America, continuing the works she had begun. Her feast day is celebrated on 23 September.