Suzanne Aubert

Suzanne Aubert (born June 19, 1835 in Saint-Symphorien-de-Lay , † October 1, 1926 in Wellington ) was a French Roman Catholic religious woman, missionary and religious founder in New Zealand .

life and work

From Lyon to New Zealand

Until she was five years old, Suzanne Aubert grew up in a rural area near Roanne . This time was overshadowed by an accident at the age of two that made her unable to walk for three years and from which she retained a lifelong squint. In 1840 the parents moved to Lyon , where the father ran a bailiff's office with eight employees. The mother was pious, the father an atheist. At the age of 12 she saw a brother die of a head of water. She attended school with the Benedictine Sisters of La Rochette founded by Thérèse de Bavoz . The family lived near the Marist Fathers . So Suzanne came into contact with the work of the propagation of the faith founded by Pauline Jaricot in Lyon and devoured reports from the overseas missions in their magazine Annales de la propagation de la foi . She decided at an early age, who believed that she was lacking any physical beauty, to go on an overseas mission from the age of majority (then 25 years). She was trained in housekeeping, pharmacology and as a nurse. She was gifted both linguistically (Italian and Spanish) and musically (piano and other instruments).

Her father was strictly against her life plans, but Suzanne consulted the pastor of Ars several times and received the necessary backing from him to secretly leave her parents' home on August 4, 1860 and to meet Jean-Baptiste Pompallier on September 4 , Bishop of Auckland , to embark three companions and some missionaries on a whaling ship that took them to New Zealand . After a four-month voyage, during which she received her first instruction in the Maori language from Pompallier despite permanent seasickness , the ship landed in Auckland on December 30th .

Sister Mary Joseph of Mercy

In Auckland she became a postulant of the Irish Sisters of Mercy (RSM) founded by Catherine McAuley (1778–1841) in Dublin in 1831 , who were the first women religious to work in New Zealand since 1850. As the sisters only spoke English, it was difficult to get used to. On June 30, 1861, she was dressed and took the religious name of Mary Joseph .

Sister of the holy family

But since it was not right for her to be used only for French, piano and embroidery lessons for the higher daughters of the whites instead of in the Maori mission, she persuaded Pompallier to found the Congregation of the Holy Family . There she was dressed in new clothes on May 18, 1862 together with 2 other French women (including Pompallier's niece) and two Maor women. Pompallier lived in the house; In addition to French, Maori was spoken and kept in contact with the Maori. Thanks to her progress in the Maori language, with the help of her Maori co-sister Peata, she managed to gain personal access to the heart of the Māori culture. She was welcomed in the villages and welcomed numerous Maori acquaintances Pompalliers. On August 14, 1863, they moved to a newly built monastery, the Institute of Nazareth, where Sister Mary Joseph set up a vegetable garden. One made a living from raising Maori girls. During visits to Maori villages, the nurse Mary Joseph was able to exchange ideas with the village healers.

Crisis. Abandoned by Pompallier

The situation came to a head in the second half of the 1960s. The Maoris lynched the Protestant missionary Carl Sylvius Völkner . War broke out. The financially ruined alcoholic Pompallier embarked for Europe on February 19, 1868 with his niece. Other sisters and Pompallier's nephew had capitulated beforehand. Of the dozen students, only Peata and Mary Joseph remained, because the latter had refused to give up as well. Since the monastery was auctioned off with all Pompallier's belongings, Sister Mary Joseph was dependent on the help of befriended families. She ignored the father's invitation to return home like the others.

Nurse in Napier

With the support of Bishop James Alipius Goold (1812–1886) of Melbourne and with the intention of joining the Tiers Ordre de Marie, founded in 1850 by Pierre Julien Eymard . To join TOM (Third Order of Mary), Mary Joseph decided in 1869 to go with Peata and the students to the Marist Father Euloge Reignier in Meeanee, district of Napier , in Hawke Bay . But she was forced by Pompallier's successor, Bishop Croke (1870–1874), to give up the Maori children and Peata. So she arrived alone in Napier (Diocese of Wellington) in 1871, where she first had her poor eyesight treated, worked as a herb collector and waited for his successor to be used for her after the death of Bishop Philippe Viard (June 1872). The offer to join the Missionary Sisters of Notre-Dame, founded by Euphrasie Barbier , was turned down because of her lack of a vocation for contemplative cloistering. Her main activity consisted for years in the care of old Marists (according to Antoine Séon 1807-1878) and even more in the medical treatment of the Maori people who loved them and by whom they were loved. The high points of her work were a typhus epidemic in the winter of 1875, and a diphtheria epidemic in 1880–1881, during which she earned the reputation of a faith healer. She later described the period from 1869 to 1883 as the most beautiful of her life.

Marist on the Whanganui River

Francis Mary Redwood , first Archbishop of Wellington (1874–1935), sympathized with her Maori calling. But in order to be able to work among the Maoris in a mission station, she needed a priest missionary. This came in 1879 in the form of the Marist Christophe Soulas. She wrote a conversation book with a dictionary for him to learn the Maori language quickly and traveled with him to many Maori places of residence. In July 1883 they occupied the Jerusalem / Hiruharama Mission on the Whanganui River ( 65 km upstream from Wanganui , 15 km downstream from Pipiriki ). There Archbishop Redwood made Sister Mary Joseph superior of a Marist congregation that began missionary life in 1884 with four postulants. The conversation book appeared in print in 1885 under the title New and complete manual of Maori conversation and was published for more than a century. In 1888 she bought a farm 5 km away with the maternal inheritance. When the wooden church, newly built in 1885, burned down (due to arson) in November 1888, she embarked on a year-long begging trip across the North and South Islands and returned with the amount necessary for the new building.

Founder of the order

Since the Lyon Marists finally refused to accept Mother Mary Joseph's Congregation, she founded her own order with the help of Archbishop Redwood on October 4, 1892 (at the age of 57; she had been in New Zealand for 32 years now): Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion DOLC / Figlie di Nostra Signora della Compassione / Filles de Notre-Dame de la Compassion (German: Daughters of Our Lady of Mercy). With further inheritance, she built an orphanage for foundlings in Jerusalem / Hiruharama from 1895 and promised anonymity to the numerous celibate mothers . In 1899 she went to Wellington and opened another house there in 1900, the Sankt-Joseph-Heim for the terminally ill (especially the handicapped), where, after initially commuting between the two houses, she later stayed permanently. In addition, she set up people's kitchens and tables. When she had to write the rule of the order, threatened to suffocate in financial worries and had to drive Father Soulas out of Jerusalem / Hiruharama because of scandalous terror regiment (with corporal punishment of religious women), she came to the brink of resilience and could only hold on to the previous warnings and keeping prophecies of the pastor of Ars afloat. In 1907 she built Our Lady's Home of Compassion in the Wellington suburb of Island Bay. A first heart attack occurred. In 1910, at the request of Bishop George Lenihan, she founded another house in Auckland.

Trip to Rome from 1913 to 1920

In view of growing criticism of the acceptance of foundlings, especially on the part of the Vicar General (and later Archbishop) Thomas O'Shea SM (1870-1954), Mother Mary Joseph, following the example of Mary MacKillop and Euphrasie Barbier , decided to become Pope travel and fight for independence from the local bishop so that her work does not pass into the hands of the archbishop after her death. In August 1913, the 78-year-old secretly left New Zealand and traveled via Vancouver , Québec , England and France to Rome , where she was able to win over Cardinal Girolamo Maria Gotti , Prefect of the Propaganda Congregation , and Pope Pius X for herself. The outbreak of World War I, the death of the Pope and the need to present the Order's statutes in languages ​​that are understood in Rome extended her stay for years. On April 1, 1917, she received from Pope Benedict XV. the decree of praise necessary for independence, but had to remain in Rome until August 1919. Her main interlocutors were the Cardinals Bonaventura Cerretti and Francis Aidan Gasquet . She lived temporarily with Pietro Fumasoni Biondi's parents . She visited well over 300 Roman churches. For years, despite her age, she worked self-sacrificingly as a nurse and right-hand man for the surgeons who first dealt with the victims of the Avezzano earthquake in 1915 and then with the war casualties around the clock. She was a victim of road accidents with horses several times. She had to drive away a thief with a punch on the nose. The return journey via Lyon, Ars , Paris, London and Durban took months. On January 28, 1920 she was back in Wellington.

Death in Wellington. State funeral. Beatification process

In the last six years of her life, the sacraments of death were given to her several times , but she came up every time to continue to lead actively, even if her movement was restricted. In 1925 she experienced the canonization of the pastor of Ars, to whom she attributed her vocation and perseverance. Wellington celebrated its 90th birthday in the same year. When she was dying a year later, she was visited by Sir James Carroll , New Zealand's first Maori minister, who passed away three weeks after her. On October 4, 1926, thousands followed her coffin, including Prime Minister Gordon Coates . It was New Zealand's first state funeral. Archbishop Redwood delivered the funeral sermon. Her remains have been resting since 1950 in the mother house of the Order Our Lady's Home of Compassion in Island Bay, where an order museum ( Suzanne Aubert Heritage Center ) traces her life. She is remembered in Lyon (Saint-Nizier Church) and in Wellington's Karori Cemetery . After the future Cardinal John Atcherley Dew had achieved the initiation of a beatification process in Rome in 2006 , she was awarded the title Venerable Servant of God by Pope Francis on December 1, 2016 .

Reception history

In 1962 Barbara Harper (1908-1984) published a short biography (entitled Unto these least), which was sold in the Wellington parent company and reprinted in 1988. In 2001 it served the historian Yannick Essertel as a source for a two-page biographical sketch in his book on the mission going out from Lyon ( L'aventure missionnaire lyonnaise 1815–1962 , pp. 107, 238–240). The breakthrough to widespread fame in New Zealand and Lyon came in 1996 from Jessie Munro (* 1946), whose portrayal The Story of Suzanne Aubert was chosen as Book of the Year in New Zealand in 1997 and initiated the episcopal initiative for beatification. The book was published in French in 2011 (with a foreword by Cardinal Philippe Barbarin ) and resulted in her career being the subject of a published sermon on Lent in the Basilica Notre-Dame de Fourvière in 2014 .

Works (chronological)

• New and complete manual of Maori conversation containing phrases and dialogues on a variety of useful and interesting topics, together with a few general rules of grammar and a comprehensive vocabulary. Lyon and Blair, Wellington 1885. Numerous reprints.
• Letters on the go. The Correspondence of Suzanne Aubert , ed. by Jessie Munro and Sister Bernadette Wrack. Bridget Williams Books, Wellington 2009.
• Suzanne Aubert's spiritual tonics . Sisters of Compassion, Wellington 2015.

Literature (alphabetical)

• Agnès Bread and Guillemette de Laborie: Héroïnes de Dieu. L'épopée des religieuses missionnaires au XIXe siècle . Artège Editions, Paris 2016.
• Yannick Essertel: L'aventure missionnaire lyonnaise 1815–1962 . Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris 2001.
• Yannick Essertel: Jean-Baptise Pompallier. Vicaire apostolique des Maoris (1838–1868) . Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris 2014.
• Figures lyonnaises de la foi. Conférences de Carême 2014 in Fourvière . Parole et silence, Paris 2014.
• Barbara Harper: Unto these least. The story of Mother Aubert and her great work . Wellington 1962, 1988.
• Jessie Munro: The Story of Suzanne Aubert . Auckland University Press, Auckland 1996.
  • (French version) Madeleine Le Jeune and Jessie Munro: Suzanne Aubert 1835–1926. Une Française chez les Maoris . Salvator, Paris 2011. (Foreword: Philippe Barbarin , Afterword: Jean-Yves Riocreux )

Web links

• Literature by and about Suzanne Aubert in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Short biography , English
• Short biography , French