St. Louise de Marillac
Mar 15
Patron Saint of Sick People, Widows and Orphans, and Social Workers
Louise was the daughter of Louis de Marillac, the Lord of Ferrières, a French nobleman. She never knew her mother who died shortly after her birth. Ordinarily there is something wanting in a child not brought up in a mother’s care; in Louise, however, this privation in her own childhood made her better understand the love necessary for the little motherless beings that she would one day snatch from death. She was raised partially by her father and partially by her aunt, for whom she was named, a Dominican religious at Poissy.
Intelligent, ardent and pious, she first wished to become a religious but at twenty-two, under her confessor’s advice, she accepted marriage to Antoine Le Gras, a young secretary to Queen Marie de Medicis. The couple was happily married in February of 1613 and had an only son, Michel.
In 1619, Mlle. Le Gras came to know Francis de Sales who was to provide her with great support and consolation in her future trials. Around 1621, Antoine contracted a chronic illness, believed to have been a form of tuberculosis, and eventually became bedridden. Troubled by the thought that she had rejected an early call to the religious life, Louise took a vow in 1623 never to remarry should her husband die before her. Antoine’s illness did, in fact, accompany him to his deathbed and he died on December 21, 1625.