St. Julie Billiart

Who they were

Julie was a Picardy farm girl of such early catechetical gift that the parish priest let her teach as a teenager. In her early thirties, the shock of an assassination attempt on her father, a shot through the window as she sat beside him, brought on a paralysis that deepened over years until she could barely speak.

From that bed, for over two decades, Julie ran catechism classes and formed a circle of women, and, hunted during the Revolution for hiding faithful priests, was smuggled between safehouses in a hay cart: paralyzed, wanted, and undeterred. Her constant sentence, kept by everyone who knew her, was oh, how good is the good God. In 1804, during a novena she did not know was being offered for her, she was told to take a step for the Sacred Heart, and walked. The last twelve years went at double speed: the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, founded for the education of poor girls, with Julie crossing France and Belgium on foot establishing schools until her death in 1816.

Why people turn to St. Julie Billiart

People with disabilities and long illness, alongside St. Margaret of Castello. Margaret was received as she was and Julie was both enduring and healed, and both are true without either being promised. Teachers of the poor by her whole life.

How to ask their intercession

From the bed, the chair, or the limited day, since her twenty two years say the work counts from there. Her sentence is the prayer: how good is the good God, said on the hard days as the act of defiance she made it.