MEET OUR SACRED HEARTS FAMILY!
(By Sr. Mary Dolorine Pires, SS.CC.)
Second Sunday of Advent
Aloha once again. We hope you enjoyed the first article in this series, which we hope you will find on this page weekly until Easter. We hope you’ll keep happily reading and learning your “family history.” As we explained, our focus will be the Sacred Hearts Congregation, since our parish and mission church have been served by Sacred Hearts priests for over a hundred years—and that brings YOU, the parishioners, into our Family.
This week we will write about the founding of the religious Congregation to which we belong. The date is easy to remember: Christmas Eve, 1800. The place: Poitiers, France. The era: during the French Revolution.
Obviously, God willed that the Sacred Hearts Family should be founded during troubled times when the Church was severely persecuted. This will explain the SS.CC. Mission, Charism, and Spirituality, about which we will write each week.
Here we wish to introduce our holy Founders, whose causes for canonization have been introduced in Rome. We were founded by a lay woman belonging to the French nobility, and by a priest who risked his life to serve the people who had been long without priestly care. They decided to found what we are today - 206 years later - one religious family of Priests, Brothers, and Sisters serving worldwide. Associates or Secular branch members, while remaining lay persons without vows, can help fulfill the Mission of the consecrated SS.CC.s. Both groups exist in Hawaii.
Because of her holiness, we call our Foundress (Henriette Aymer de la Chevalerie, 1767-1834) “our Good Mother.” For the same reason, we call our Founder (Pierre, in religion Marie-Joseph Coudrin, 1768-1837) “our Good Father.”
After being imprisoned for sheltering a priest (a crime during the French Revolution), our Good Mother barely escaped the guillotine. Freed at age twenty-seven, she decided to give her life entirely to God. Wanting to make reparation for the sins that offended God, she went frequently to a place where the Blessed Sacrament was adored in secret.
Our Good Father, sought by the police after his first Mass during which he publicly declared himself against the godless government, hid for several months in the attic of a farmhouse belonging to a relative. There he had a vision of men and women taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth. He bravely left that attic and, in disguise, began to serve the people. He eventually became spiritual director of the group which met with Henriette to keep the adoration. God had brought together the two him He willed would found a Family which today is OUR Sacred Hearts Family!