Marie de Jésus Deluil-Martiny

Marie de Jésus Deluil-Martiny, born Marie-Caroline Deluil-Martiny, was a French Roman Catholic religious sister of the nineteenth century and the foundress of the Congregation of the Daughters of the Heart of Jesus. She was born on 28 May 1841 in Marseille, France, into a devout Catholic family; her father was Paul Deluil-Martiny. She was educated by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Marseille, an environment in which her lifelong devotion to the Heart of Jesus was formed. From adolescence she felt drawn to consecrated life and to a vocation of reparation for offenses against the Sacred Heart, a theme then prominent in French Catholicism in the wake of the cult associated with Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and the broader nineteenth-century revival of Sacred Heart devotion.

In the 1860s she made a private vow of chastity and became active in the Apostleship of Prayer, the Jesuit-promoted movement of daily offering and devotion to the Sacred Heart. After a period of discernment she founded the Congregation of the Daughters of the Heart of Jesus in the early 1870s, with the institute taking shape around 1873. The congregation combined a contemplative and Eucharistic character with the offering of the sisters’ lives in reparation. An early house was established at Berchem, near Antwerp in Belgium, and further foundations followed in France, including at the property of La Servianne on the outskirts of Marseille, where she later resided as superior. The spirituality of the institute centered on the Heart of Jesus, Eucharistic adoration, and a spirit of loving reparation.

On 27 February 1884, at the convent of La Servianne near Marseille, she was fatally stabbed by Louis Chave, a young gardener employed on the property who held anti-clerical and anarchist views. She died of her wounds the same day, at the age of forty-two. Contemporary Catholic accounts treated her death as a violent death accepted in a spirit of reparation, and in some circles as a form of martyrdom. The congregation continued after her death and subsequently spread.

The cause for her beatification was introduced in due course in the twentieth century. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 October 1989 in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. Her liturgical memorial is observed on 27 February. She has not been canonized. She is venerated especially within her congregation and among devotees of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.