Julie Billiart: Woman Who Took Risks

Julie showed that she would rise to the occasion even as a child. When she was just sixteen her parents suffered a set back due to vandalism and theft of their small shop.

Immediately Julie’s love for her parents impelled her to assume a major part of the responsibility for providing for the family. Harvest time was approaching and Julie found employment in the fields. When she was working with the unlettered field hands, they found that they did not curse or use vulgar language; there was something of God in her that inspired a reverence and respect which brought out the best in them. She worked as hard as any of them and they grew to be very fond of her. Roseanne Murphy: Woman of Courage –pg 12

When harvest time was over, Julie sensed her father’s distress when he told her that some in Cuvilly would give him only a third of the value for the pieces of cloth left by the thieves. At once Julie volunteered to take the materials to Beauvais, a town about twenty miles south of Cuvilly, to try to get a better price…she took the material in to the shopkeeper who, after hearing her story, gave her the full price of the material…. For six years she continued her labors in the fields and the strongest and ablest workers could not accomplish more than she.

Roseanne Murphy: Woman of Courage –pg 13

At this early age Julie found her strength and support in her relationship to God.

Work in the fields, her journeys on foot or horseback, her domestic chores, her lace making and her charitable works filled Julie’s days, and sometimes her nights as she sat a t the bedside of the dying. She found her strength in her daily mass, her morning meditations and her visits to the church whenever possible. She went wherever there was a need in the village.

Roseanne Murphy: Woman of Courage –pg 15

Her deep convictions and sense of what was right and true guided her and others through the troubled times.

When the villagers did not know what to do, Julie would encourage them to remain steadfast in their faith. “Better no mass, she would say, than one with a schismatic priest.” So effective was her resistance to the schism, that it is recorded in the archives in Compiegne:

The only commune in the district where there were serious incidents concerning oaths of allegiance was at Cuvilly, situated in the north of the district on the Flanders road. This little village seems to have a particular character, because of the presence of a young and very pious paralytic by the name of Julie Billiart whose “fanatical” influence was very great in Cuvilly even before the Revolution. Roseanne Murphy: Woman of Courage –pg 24

As she matured, Julie’s world grew wider and encompassed more dangerous, risky and apostolic endeavors.

When Julie took the first group of sisters to Namur in January of 1809, a clean break had finally been decided upon. After many fluctuations, the two foundresses and those sisters who wanted

to follow them were clearly being driven out of the Amiens diocese. To both Mere Julie and Mere St. Joseph this meant that in justice such temporal goods as the community had acquired now belonged to the house at Namur. Actually the fortune of Mere St. Joseph and the gifts of Madame de Franssu, while making the beginnings possible, were not very great. Mere St. Joseph delineates them clearly. … Once she had made a decision which she thought was right she always acted upon it at any cost, and she wanted to help her friend to do the same. Julie brought from her early life of hardship a practicality which was an essential aspect of her leadership as a foundress and also of the “wholeness” of her spirituality. As Mere St. Joseph says, “It was a principle with her that God asks of us not only that we care for the spiritual but that, in honour of the good order which he has established in all things and in gratitude for his gifts, we also care for the temporal. It may be said that God had given her the grace to understand this well and that she never spared herself in caring it out.”

Introduction to Book Two of the Letters

The rise and fall of the Napoleonic Empire, 1804-16, was the historical background against which Julie founded her Congregation. Although … it might seem that Julie went from place to place founding houses very smoothly, nothing could be further from the truth. … the struggles Julie underwent: not only those with bishops and priests, over the governing of her Congre-gation, but also a bitter dispute with some of her most trusted Sisters. …Julie’s answer to the profound poverty of her time was to found a Congregation for the education of the ‘poor of the most abandoned places’-initially the poor, younger girls she saw all around her.

Myra Poole, SND: Prayer, Protest, Power - pg 111

After 22 years of being unable to walk, Julie was to spend the rest of her life “on the road”, in establishing and visiting houses for poor children. Francoise calculated that she did at least 119 journeys, yet an argument can be made that Julie actually made 378. …her journeys, (and the courage needed) can scarcely be imagined, except by those who have lived and worked in developing countries. Myra Poole, SND: Prayer, Protest, Power - pg 118

We know that Julie’s trust in the face of tribulations, risk and the unknown was deepened by her life experiences.

Julie’s life was no life of ease. All the time as she moved around founding new schools for the poor, in all weathers and often in great personal pain, she underwent great misunderstanding from bishops and priests as well as from her own Sisters…. To these troubles Julie’s most frequent response was, “The work of God needs to be tested, so that its foundations may be more solid“(Letter 74). Myra Poole, SND: Prayer, Protest, Power - pg 134-135

The retelling of Julie’s birthing of her Congregations, against a background of opposition and intrigue, is her story of resistance to the evil of all-consuming, addictive needs by certain people within the Church, to control her every thought and move. Julie’s “glory land’, her place of freedom, was to be Namur, Belgium, where her Congregation at last found a home.

Myra Poole, SND: Prayer, Protest, Power - pg 139

Celebrating Ntre Dame