Mary Catherine of St. Augustine

Marie-Catherine de Saint-Augustin was born Catherine Simon de Longpré on 3 May 1632 at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy, in the Kingdom of France. Her mother died while she was still an infant, and she grew up in a devout Catholic household. From childhood she showed a marked attraction to prayer and to the care of the poor and the sick. At about the age of twelve she entered the monastery of the Augustinian Hospitallers of the Mercy of Jesus at Bayeux, a community of canonesses regular whose apostolate was hospital work. She received the religious name Catherine of Saint Augustine (Marie-Catherine de Saint-Augustin) and made her profession while still in her mid-teens, already intending a life of hidden sacrifice.

In 1648, at only sixteen years of age, she volunteered for the mission in New France and crossed the Atlantic to reinforce the small community of Augustinian sisters who staffed the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, the hospital founded by her order in 1639. She arrived in Quebec in August 1648 and never returned to France. For the remaining twenty years of her life she nursed French colonists and Indigenous patients through epidemics, scarcity, and the insecurity of war. Inside the monastery she served in offices that included treasurer and mistress of novices, and she helped to sustain a still fragile foundation under conditions of real material poverty.

Her inner life, as recorded by the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau, who knew her and later wrote her biography, was marked by intense mystical experience, prolonged spiritual trial, and a deliberate offering of herself as a victim for the conversion and preservation of the colony. She cultivated a particular devotion to the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf after his death in 1649 and believed herself aided by him in spiritual combat. Bishop François de Laval and other leading figures of the early Canadian Church esteemed her. Ragueneau’s life of her, published in Paris in 1671 as La vie de la mere Catherine de Saint Augustin, made her reputation for holiness known in France as well as in Canada.

She died in Quebec on 8 May 1668 at the age of thirty-six, worn down by illness and austerity, and was buried at the Hôtel-Dieu. Veneration began soon after her death. After a long process she was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 23 April 1989. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 8 May. She is remembered as one of the principal spiritual figures of seventeenth-century New France and as a foundress of the Catholic hospital tradition in Canada.