Louise Marguerite Claret de la Touche

Louise Marguerite Claret de la Touche was a French Catholic nun, mystic, and foundress born in 1868 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Île-de-France. Raised in a Catholic household, she discerned a religious vocation and in 1891 entered the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary at the monastery of Romans-sur-Isère in the Dauphiné. As a Visitandine she lived the contemplative rule associated with Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal, a spirituality already oriented toward the Sacred Heart of Jesus and toward hidden, gentle fidelity. She remained a Visitandine through the greater part of her religious life before circumstances of mission and health drew her toward a new foundation.

In the early twentieth century she reported interior graces that she understood as a call to make known what she called the Work of Infinite Love: devotion to the Sacred Heart conceived as God’s boundless charity, with a particular insistence on the sanctification of priests. Under obedience she composed spiritual pages later gathered as The Book of Infinite Love and related texts on the Sacred Heart and the priesthood. These writings circulated among ecclesiastics, and she sought to bring the message to the attention of the Holy See in the years of Pius X. Historical knowledge of these experiences depends largely on her manuscripts and on the small circle of directors who knew her; they should be read as her own testimony rather than as independently corroborated public events.

The situation of religious congregations in France after the secularization laws, together with her health and her sense of mission, led her to Italy. In 1914, at Vische in Piedmont, in the diocese of Ivrea, she established the first community of Bethany of the Sacred Heart (Béthanie du Sacré-Cœur). The institute was conceived as a house of prayer and hospitality in the spirit of the Gospel home at Bethany, offering priests a place of rest and adoration while the sisters themselves lived a life centered on the Sacred Heart. The foundation received local episcopal support. The congregation of the Sisters of Bethany of the Sacred Heart continued after her death and preserved that charism of prayer and welcome toward priests.

She died at Vische in 1915, only about a year after the foundation. She has not been beatified or canonized. Her writings on Infinite Love and the priesthood remained in circulation in French and in translation among devotees of the Sacred Heart. Many particulars of her family background, of her last illness, and of the exact site of her burial are not firmly established in widely available scholarly sources; what can be stated with confidence is the outline of her Visitandine years, the Italian foundation of 1914, and the continued existence of the congregation she began.