Marie-Henriette de la Providence is a saint of the Catholic Church (1760 - 1794). Marie-Henriette de la Providence's feast day is celebrated on 17 July.
Marie-Henriette de la Providence
Saint- Life Span
- 1760 - 1794 (age 34)
- Feast Day
- 17 July
- Gender
- female
- Church
- Catholic
Places
Roles & Family
Religious Information
Canonization
Biography
Marie-Henriette de la Providence was a French Discalced Carmelite nun numbered among the sixteen Blessed Martyrs of Compiègne. Born Anne Pelras in 1760 at Cajarc in the Quercy region of southern France, she entered the monastery of Discalced Carmelite nuns at Compiègne and took the name Sister Marie-Henriette of Providence. Surviving records say little about her family or the years before her entrance into religious life. She lived the traditional enclosed life of a Teresian Carmelite, devoted to prayer, the Divine Office, and the austerities of the reform, in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution.
When revolutionary legislation suppressed religious houses, the community of Compiègne was driven from its monastery in 1792. The nuns took lodgings in the town and strove to maintain their rule and community life in civilian clothing. In this period the sisters made an act of consecration offering their lives to God for the restoration of peace to France and to the Church. Sister Marie-Henriette remained with her sisters through these years of concealment and hardship.
Arrested in June 1794, the Carmelites were first held in Compiègne and then transferred to the Conciergerie in Paris. Tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal on charges of fanaticism and conspiracy against the Republic, they were sentenced to death. On 17 July 1794 the sixteen nuns were executed by guillotine at the Place du Trône-Renversé. They mounted the scaffold singing the Salve Regina and other liturgical chants and publicly renewed their vows. Marie-Henriette de la Providence, then in her mid-thirties, was among those who died that day.
The bodies of the martyrs were buried in a common grave at the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. Devotion to the Compiègne Carmelites grew in the nineteenth century, and they were beatified together by Pope Pius X in 1906. Their feast is observed on 17 July. Marie-Henriette de la Providence is honored with her community as a martyr of the faith who persevered in her Carmelite vocation until death.