Thérèse Couderc

Marie-Victoire Couderc was born on 1 February 1805 in the hamlet of Le Mas in the commune of Sablières, in the Ardèche of southern France, into a devout farming family. Raised in a rural Catholic milieu still marked by the aftermath of the Revolution, she showed an early inclination to religious life. In the mid-1820s she came under the influence of the missionary priest Jean-Pierre Étienne Terme, who had gathered a small group of women as the Sisters of Saint Regis to teach and to support parish missions in the countryside. She entered that community, took the name Thérèse, and was soon associated with a new work Terme opened in 1826 at Lalouvesc, a mountain pilgrimage town linked to Saint John Francis Regis. There the sisters began to receive women for spiritual retreats. That house of retreat, named after the Cenacle in Jerusalem, became the origin of a distinct congregation devoted to the Spiritual Exercises and to hospitality for people seeking God in silence.

After Terme’s death in 1834, Couderc remained at the head of the emerging Congregation of Our Lady of the Retreat in the Cenacle. The sisters’ life combined Eucharistic devotion, a Marian orientation, and the offering of hospitality to retreatants. In the late 1830s the community fell into serious debt and internal conflict. Couderc was removed from the office of superior and spent long years in subordinate and often hidden tasks, including ordinary domestic work, without leaving the congregation she had helped to found. She accepted the loss of authority without public protest. That period of obscurity shaped the spirituality for which she is remembered: a doctrine of self-surrender, expressed in a short text on “se livrer,” in which she taught that to surrender oneself to God is more than to give oneself, because it places the whole person at God’s disposal without reserve or self-seeking.

In later life her reputation for holiness and spiritual discernment grew again within the Cenacle, even though she did not resume general government of the institute. She died at Lalouvesc on 26 September 1885. The congregation spread beyond France and continues the apostolate of retreats and spiritual formation. Couderc was beatified by Pope Pius XII on 4 November 1951 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 10 May 1970. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 26 September. Her remains are venerated at the Cenacle in Lalouvesc.