France and England in North America, Part IV: The Old Régime In CanadaParkman, Francis
History
France and England in North America, Part IV: The Old Régime In Canada
Parkman, Francis
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France)
If there are no Canadian names on the calendar of saints, it is not
because in byways and obscure places Canada had not virtues worthy
of canonization. Not alone her male martyrs and female devotees, whose
merits have found a chronicle and a recognition; not the fantastic
devotion of Madame d’Aillebout, who, lest she should not suffer
enough, took to herself a vicious and refractory servant girl, as an
exercise of patience; and not certainly the mediaeval pietism of Jeanne
Le Ber, the
* Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre de--Sept., 1661.
venerated recluse of Montreal. There are others quite as worthy of
honor, whose names have died from memory. It is difficult to conceive a
self-abnegation more complete than that of the hospital nuns of Quebec
and Montreal. In the almost total absence of trained and skilled
physicians, the burden of the sick and wounded fell upon them. Of the
two communities, that of Montreal was the more wretchedly destitute,
while that of Quebec was exposed, perhaps, to greater dangers. Nearly
every ship from France brought some form of infection, and all infection
found its way to the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec. The nuns died, but they
never complained. Removed from the arena of ecclesiastical strife, too
busy for the morbidness of the cloister, too much absorbed in practical
benevolence to become the prey of illusions, they and their sister
community were models of that benign and tender charity of which the
Roman Catholic Church is so rich in examples. Nor should the Ursulines
and the nuns of the Congregation be forgotten among those who, in
another field of labor, have toiled patiently according to their light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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