Marie-Clement Staub

Marie-Clément Staub, born Joseph Staub in 1876 at Kaysersberg in Alsace, was a Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Augustinians of the Assumption (Assumptionists) and the founder of the Sisters of Saint Joan of Arc. At the time of his birth Alsace belonged to the German Empire, having been annexed after the Franco-Prussian War; the region nevertheless remained strongly marked by French Catholic culture. He entered the Assumptionists, a congregation founded in the nineteenth century by Emmanuel d’Alzon and known for education, the press, and missions, and took the religious name Marie-Clément. After formation and ordination he was assigned to Assumptionist work in North America.

In the United States he was associated with the Assumptionist community in Worcester, Massachusetts. The early twentieth century saw a revival of devotion to Joan of Arc, who was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920. Drawing on that devotion, Staub conceived a women’s congregation whose members would assist priests through prayer and through practical service in rectories and religious houses, so that clergy might be freer for pastoral work. The sisters were to combine a hidden life of hospitality and domestic support with the example of Joan of Arc as a figure of fidelity and courage in the service of the Church.

The Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joan of Arc (Sœurs de Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc) began in Worcester in 1914. The community soon established its motherhouse at Sillery, near Quebec City, and developed from there in Canada and the United States. Staub remained the founder and a principal spiritual and organizational influence during the institute’s first decades. The congregation stayed relatively small and was oriented above all toward the support of priests, though its members later took on additional local apostolates as needs required.

Staub died in 1936 at Sillery. He has not been beatified or canonized, and no feast day is assigned to him in the universal calendar. He is remembered chiefly within the Assumptionist family and by the Sisters of Saint Joan of Arc as their founder. Readily available historical literature gives a consistent outline of his birth, religious identity, founding work, and death, but does not supply a full public record of his childhood, the exact chronology of his vows and ordination, or a detailed inner biography; such material, if it survives, would be found mainly in congregational archives.