our history...
On November 21 1800 in post-revolutionary Paris, a small group of idealistic women gathered in a secret chapel in a friend's attic. Here, during Mass, they made religious vows. Soon after they moved to Amiens where they opened a small school for girls.The youngest member of the group became their superior, her name was Madeleine Sophie Barat.
Born in 1779 in Joigny, France,
into a humble artisan family she was from her earliest years a
remarkable child. Like the other girls in the town she received
no formal schooling. However Louis, her seminarian older brother
sent home when all religious institutions were disbanded by the
Revolution, educated her in the strongly classical traditions
of the schoolboys he taught at the local grammar school. She loved
her studies, but always yearned for the contemplative life of
a Carmelite, however the Revolution had made this a near impossibility.
In 1796 Sophie went to Paris to live with Louis who had been secretly ordained a priest. Over the next four years there she and three other young women worked towards some form of dedication to God and as convents began to reopen Sophie once more dreamed of Carmel. But it was a priest, Father Joseph Varin, who helped her to see the educational needs of young girls of the new post-revolutionary generation. In their own schools girls could be guided in ways of principle and faith. So Madeleine Sophie's life as an educator began.
The schools were successful and the Society spread rapidly throughout Europe and then to the rest of the world. However, the success of the boarding school was not enough for Madeleine Sophie who always insisted on the concurrent opening of a school for poor or orphaned children on the same site as that for the richer children. Adults' needs were taken care of in the form of retreats.
Since Vatican II the Society has extended and diversified its works, but they remain educational in essence, preserving the vision of Madeleine Sophie that the Heart of Jesus is at the heart of the world . Now the establishment of smaller communities to replace the large institutional convents has brought the sisters into the midst of this world which they too seek to serve.
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