Nicolas Roland

Nicolas Roland was born on 8 December 1642 in Reims, in the Champagne region of the Kingdom of France, into a prosperous merchant family. He was the son of Jean-Baptiste Roland and Nicole Beuvelet and was baptized the same day in the parish church of Saint-Pierre-le-Vieil. He received his early schooling at the Jesuit college in Reims. Drawn to the clerical state from youth, he received the tonsure as a boy and later continued studies in philosophy and theology, including a period in Paris connected with the seminary of Saint-Sulpice and the French school of spirituality associated with Pierre de Bérulle and Jean-Jacques Olier.

In 1665 he was named a canon of the cathedral chapter of Notre-Dame de Reims, a secular dignity that gave him standing and a modest income before he was yet a priest. He was ordained to the priesthood in Paris on 3 March 1668. Returning to Reims, he devoted himself to preaching, catechesis of the poor, and the reform of local charitable works. He was especially concerned with the education of impoverished girls, who in seventeenth-century urban France often had little access to even elementary schooling. Around 1670 he took under his direction a small group of women already engaged in teaching and from that nucleus organized the Congregation of the Sisters of the Child Jesus (Sœurs de l'Enfant-Jésus), whose members lived in community, took simple vows, and provided free instruction to poor children. He also sought to improve conditions at the Hôtel-Dieu of Reims and to make Christian education in the city more systematic.

Roland belonged to the generation of French Catholic reformers who tried to put the pastoral ideals of the Council of Trent into practice at the parish and diocesan level. He remained a secular priest and cathedral canon rather than entering a religious order, though he lived austerely and was known for devotion to the Child Jesus and to the Eucharist. He was a friend and spiritual counsellor of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, later founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools; the two shared the conviction that the poor should receive both religious and practical education. Before his death Roland asked de La Salle to watch over the sisters he had founded.

He died in Reims on 27 April 1678, at the age of thirty-five, after a brief illness. The congregation he had organized survived and continued its work of educating poor children in subsequent centuries. The cause for his beatification proceeded in due course, and Pope John Paul II beatified him in Rome on 16 October 1994. His liturgical memorial is kept on 27 April. He is venerated especially in Reims and among the Sisters of the Child Jesus and those engaged in the education of the poor. He has not been canonized.