Marie-Élisabeth Turgeon

Marie-Élisabeth Turgeon was born on 7 February 1840 in Beaumont, in the Quebec region of what was then Lower Canada, the fifth of nine children of Louis-Marc Turgeon and Angèle Labrecque. Her father died in 1855, when she was fifteen, leaving the family in reduced circumstances. She completed her schooling and trained as a teacher, receiving a diploma from the Laval Normal School in Quebec City in 1862. For more than a decade thereafter she taught in parish schools in the Quebec area and became known for her devotion to the instruction of children, especially those of modest means. Over these years she also discerned a vocation to religious life.

In the 1870s Jean Langevin, first bishop of Rimouski, was seeking to provide Catholic schooling in the scattered rural parishes of his diocese along the lower St. Lawrence. He invited Turgeon to Rimouski to gather and form a group of young women who wished to become teaching sisters. She accepted and, with a small band of companions, laid the foundations of a new community. On 12 September 1879 the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary (Sœurs de Notre-Dame du Saint-Rosaire) was formally established in Rimouski, and Turgeon became its first superior. The sisters dedicated themselves to the education of children in rural and underserved districts.

Turgeon's period of leadership was short. She had long been of delicate health and developed tuberculosis. Even while ill she continued to organize the nascent congregation, to draft its early constitutions, and to form the first sisters in both the spiritual life and the work of teaching. She died in Rimouski on 17 August 1881 at the age of forty-one, scarcely two years after the canonical foundation. At her death the community was still very small, but it later grew and spread through Quebec and to other regions, remaining committed to education and related apostolic work.

The cause for her beatification was introduced in the Catholic Church. After the recognition of a miracle attributed to her intercession, Pope Francis authorized her beatification. She was beatified on 26 April 2015 at a ceremony in Rimouski presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, acting in the name of the Pope. Her feast is kept on 17 August. She is remembered as a foundress of a teaching congregation in nineteenth-century Quebec who combined practical service to the rural poor with a life of religious consecration.