Immaculate conceptions

Sophie Barat, founder of The Society of the Sacred Heart, was a prolific letter-writer

Sophie Barat, founder of The Society of the Sacred Heart, was a prolific letter-writer. Phil Kilroy, her authorised biographer, had direct access to her personal writings. With the other abundant material available to her, the author has given us a portrait of an extraordinary woman of 19th-century France: a young, single, educated woman with a vision often in conflict with the culture of her society and Church. A single woman travelling around Europe in the early 1800s was a challenge to the prevailing thought of how women should behave. Sophie defied the image of the holy woman of her times. French society and the Catholic Church found it inconceivable that a woman could be free from the control of men. A married woman's guardian was her husband, a religious woman's guardian was her local bishop.

Sophie's story involved many conflicts over the constitution and authority of the new order. She had to steer a delicate course through the conventions of her time to guarantee the unity and survival of the new community: a community that was threatened, in its darkest hour, by schism. Both Gallicanism, the preferred stance of the French nationalist church and Ultramontanism, the supremacy of the Church in Rome, challenged Sophie and her vision of an international religious order dedicated to the Sacred Heart and to the education of girls.

Her relationship with a personal God had a profound effect on her dealings with other people. Initially, her image of God had been formed by Louis Barat, her elder brother. The family environment was in the Jansenist tradition; God was judgmental, harsh and impossible to please. In mid-life, Sophie met Father Joseph Marie Favre, who introduced an alternative concept of God; his was a caring, compassionate God. In the governance of a community of strong personalities, Sophie dealt with friend and foe alike in a patient and tolerant manner.

There were no guides for her journey, and she learned to use her ability to make and sustain relationships even under the most difficult circumstances. One of her biggest battles was to ensure that the women in the congregation were not cloistered, as was the norm for female religious of the age. She wanted the schools to be open places where parents had easy access to those who taught their daughters. Despite enormous pressure from the fathers of the Church, Sophie held out on this issue and eventually achieved this radical objective. Her acceptance by Church authorities came about for two reasons: the Catholic Church had embarked on a strategy of restoration in France after the suppression of many religious orders, especially the Jesuits, and welcomed the initiative of an order committed to educating the aristocratic classes. The idea of an international order, not merely based in France, also made Sophie's project attractive to the Vatican.

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Biography, according to Phil Kilroy, is an exercise in memory, a way of retrieving the life story. Her detailed and painstaking research reveals a very human portrait of Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat. By 1865, when Sophie died, there were over 3,500 members of the congregation, in 86 institutions, all over Europe, and in North and South America. The first Irish house was opened in Roscrea in 1841, followed by Mount Anville 1851, and Armagh 1853. These schools continue to thrive in service to education.

Gina Menzies is a theologian and broadcaster