Marthe de Noaillat

Marthe de Noaillat (also: Marthe Devuns , born November 29, 1865 in Le Crotoy ; † February 5, 1926 in Paray-le-Monial ) was a French Catholic, ascetic and lecturer. She reached by Pope Pius XI. the establishment of the feast of Christ the King .

life and work

Origin and beginnings

Marthe Devuns came from an upper class family. Her godfather was Bishop Jean-Baptiste Pompallier . From the age of eight, she grew up in Cuncy Castle in Villiers-sur-Yonne ( Nièvre department ). She started collecting donations for the poor at an early age. From 1880 to 1885 she went to the boarding school of the Assumptionists in Auteuil and graduated with the certificate Brevet supérieur . In 1887 she made the first of eight trips to Rome.

Unsuccessful attempts at monastery

On February 21, 1888, she entered the monastery of the Assumptionists founded by Marie-Eugénie de Jésus in Auteuil as a postulant . After five months she moved to the Jouarre Benedictine monastery , but returned to Auteuil in December. She was sent to Poitiers , where her older sister Marie was already an Assumptionist, and it was there in February 1889 that she experienced the breakthrough in her calling. She returned to Auteuil and began a novitiate , which she had to abandon in July for health reasons. Stays at home in Cuncy, as well as in Cannes , Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Bordeaux did not bring any improvement. On April 15, 1891, she left the Assumptionists a second time, recovered reasonably at home, returned to the monastery and spent the period from August 1892 to August 1894 in the Genoa branch . Then she realistically had to find out that she was not made for monastic life and returned to worldly life.

Paris and Nevers

From 1895 she lived with her mother and three siblings in Paris and continued her commitment to the poor in Rue Mouffetard. From 1896 to 1901 she lived in a house made available by her mother in Nevers and lived there under Spartan circumstances, entirely dedicated to the apostolate of the workers, the poor and marginalized in society, only interrupted by a trip to the Holy Land .

Leader in the Patriotic Women's League

From 1902 she went to Auteuil as director of the private school Cours Bossuet . There she met Georges de Noaillat (1874–1948) and his sister Simone (her future biographer), whom she recruited as speakers for the Ligue patriotique des Françaises , the most important French women's association of the first half of the 20th century (500,000 members in 1911) who originally (1902) had been anti-revolutionary, anti-socialist and anti-Semitic in the right-wing political spectrum in defense of the left republic , but from 1906 he shifted his main energy to the defense of Catholicism and the social sphere. There Marthe Devuns was perceived as an exceptional personality who combined the highest intellectual and spiritual demands with the toughest private self-mortification. She felt that she was part of an elite that felt obliged to apostolate those who had missed out.

Paray-le-Monial

De Noaillat introduced them from 1903 to the Hieron Museum ( Musée du Hiéron ) in Paray-le-Monial, which he directed, and to the Society of the Social Rulership of Jesus Christ ( Société du Règne , founded in 1882 by Henri Ramière ). Thanks to the Jesuit Victor Drevon (1820–1880) and, after him, the Baron Alexis de Sarachaga (1840–1918), Paray-le-Monial had become an up-and-coming place of pilgrimage and center of devotion to the Sacred Heart (with Hieron as a research center) .

Marriage and Congress Life

In 1911, at the age of 46, Marthe Devuns married Georges de Noaillat, who was nine years his junior, and whose collaborator she had already become and with whom she traveled to numerous national and international congresses (above all the World Eucharistic Congresses ). From 1912 she considered herself the second mother of her sister-in-law's first (disabled) child.

Christ the King campaign

After the First World War and the death of Sarachaga, the couple de Noaillat made the Hieron Museum in Paray-le-Monial the center of a movement that agitated for the social kingship of Christ. In December 1919, Marthe de Noaillat decided to restart the campaign for the feast of Christ the King. The Turin Jesuit Giovanni Maria Sanna-Solaro (1824–1908) failed in 1899 before the Congregation for Rites because Pope Leo XIII. in the encyclical Annum sacrum just consecrated the whole world to the heart of Jesus and Christ King and which was initially considered sufficient. Marthe's insistence is to be understood primarily from the French context, in which the creation of such a festival was understood by the predominantly anti - modernist right-wing conservative church as a blow against revolution , secularism , atheism and, in some cases, against democracy (many Catholics were monarchists) . The human rights praised by the revolution should be opposed to the rights of God. It was not by chance that Marguerite-Marie Alacoque and Jeanne d'Arc (both 1920) and Therese von Lisieux (beatified in 1923, canonized in 1925) were canonized during this period .

Establishment of the feast of Christ the King and death

Marthe de Noaillat wrote an extensively argued supplicant to Pope Benedict XV. , but the Pope demanded the broad approval of the bishops. The couple received the signature of 779 bishops (out of a total of around 1000) within five years. On December 31, 1925, Pius XI proclaimed. in his encyclical Quas primas the establishment of the feast of Christ the King. A month later Marthe de Noaillat died at the age of 60 in the rooms of the Hieron Museum together with a companion of carbon monoxide poisoning . Her husband became a priest and died 23 years later. The Jesuit Johann-Baptist Kettenmeyer (1882–1945) called her in 1938 an “Apostle of the Kingdom of Christ”.

literature

• Evelyne Diebolt: Militer au XXe siècle. Femmes, féminismes, églises et société. Dictionnaire biographique . Houdiard, Paris 2009, pp. 251-254.
• Johann-Baptist Kettenmeyer (1882–1945): "Martha de Noaillat and the introduction of the Christ the King Festival". In: Spirit and Life . Zeitschrift für Christian Spiritualität 13, 1938, pp. 184–201 (online).
• Simone de Noaillat: Marthe de Noaillat 1865–1926 . Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1931.
  • (Italian) Marta de Noaillat. Milan 1933, 1935, 1949.
  • (German) "... a woman". Alsatia, Colmar 1935, 1947 (review in: Güssinger Zeitung May 24, 1936, p. 5, online).
  • (English) The King's Advocate. Milwaukee 1942.
• Guy Thuillier: "Deux expériences spirituelles. Louise de Raffin et Marthe de Noaillat". In: M émoires de la Société académique du Nivernais 76, 1998–1999, pp. 69–82.

Web links

• Information on Marthe de Noaillat in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .
• Literature by and about Marthe de Noaillat in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries )
• Short biography by the Académie Dijon , French