St. Madeleine Sophie Barat

Who they were

Sophie Barat was a Burgundian cooper's daughter drilled in Latin, Greek and Scripture by a severe older brother. It was an education girls of her class never got, and it was administered without gentleness, and both halves of that matter, because her formation explains her reform.

In 1800, at twenty one, in a France whose schools the Revolution had wrecked, she founded the Society of the Sacred Heart for the education of girls, and then governed it for sixty three years through five French regimes, planting schools across Europe and the Americas, including the mission she entrusted to St. Rose Philippine Duchesne. Her pedagogy fused serious intellectual formation with warmth, which is to say her brother's standards without her brother's harshness, and the sentence her sisters remembered was that for a single child she would have founded the whole Society. She died in Paris in 1865 and was canonized in 1925.

Why people turn to St. Madeleine Sophie Barat

Teachers and heads of girls' schools, with St. Angela Merici and St. Katharine Drexel. And anyone leading one thing for decades, since sixty three years in the same chair is the patronage, whether the chair is a parish, a school, or a company.

How to ask their intercession

At the start of the school year, and again in the tired middle of a long tenure, for her double grace: the standard kept high and the harshness left out.