Mary Euphrasia Pelletier

Rose Virginie Pelletier was born on 31 July 1796 on the island of Noirmoutier, off the Atlantic coast of the Vendée in western France. Her father, Julien Pelletier, was a physician; her mother was Anne Mourain. The family had taken refuge on the island during the French Revolution and the related conflict in the Vendée. After her father's death in her childhood, the family moved to the mainland. She was later sent to a boarding school conducted by the Ursulines in Tours, where she received the education customary for a girl of her background in the early nineteenth century.

In 1814 she entered the monastery of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge in Tours, a community of the order founded in the seventeenth century by Saint John Eudes to receive and assist women and girls living in prostitution or other moral and social distress. She received the religious name Marie-Euphrasie (Mary Euphrasia). After profession she was given increasing responsibility in the house. In 1825 the community elected her superior, though she was still in her late twenties. As superior she sought to strengthen the work of the Refuge and to found additional houses, which brought her into tension with the traditional autonomy of each monastery of the order.

In 1829 she opened a house of the Refuge in Angers. From that foundation she worked to obtain a more centralized form of government so that sisters could be sent on mission beyond a single diocese. Pope Gregory XVI approved this arrangement in 1835, erecting the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd with its generalate at Angers and Mary Euphrasia as superior general. The new institute kept the Eudist charism of care for women and girls in difficulty, including former prostitutes, prisoners, and those judged at risk, while adding a stronger missionary and international structure. She also established a contemplative branch, often called Magdalens, whose members lived a more enclosed life of prayer in support of the active sisters.

Under her long generalate the congregation spread through France and into other parts of Europe, and then to Africa, Asia, North America, and elsewhere. She organized different types of houses, including refuges for those already in moral or social difficulty and preservation houses intended to protect girls from such situations. Contemporary accounts describe her as an energetic and sometimes demanding administrator who nevertheless insisted that the young women in the sisters' care be treated with dignity. She remained superior general until her death in Angers on 24 April 1868. By then the congregation had become one of the more widely planted women's institutes of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival.

Mary Euphrasia Pelletier was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1933 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on 2 May 1940. Her liturgical feast is observed on 24 April. She is remembered principally as foundress of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, whose communities continue works of education, social service, and pastoral care in many countries. Her remains are kept at the motherhouse of the congregation in Angers.