Extract taken from “Marist Spiritual Patrimony” by Sr Myra Niland SM - June 2009 

"As Marist Sisters we have never understood our spiritual patrimony in isolation from the events that stand at the beginnings of the Society of Mary.

Even though there were no aspirant Marist women present to add their signatures to the Pledge, made by 12 of those seminarians on the Hill of Fourvière, 23 July, 1816, Jeanne-Marie Chavoin and the early Sisters could never consider the Marist Sisters without reference to the Pledge. Even though this free and solemn Pledge was of a private nature, it marked the beginning of the Society of Mary. Seventeen years later Colin recalled this event when addressing Archbishop de Pins:
”In Lyons, at the feet of Our Lady of Fourvière, the little society came into being.”  (OM, doc. 271#1)

Pierre Colin’s letter to Jeanne-Marie Chavoin and Marie Jotillon almost a year later links these two young women with the project of the Society of Mary.  Like them, Pierre Colin knew nothing of the Marist project until Jean-Claude Colin told him the following year.  These two young women were his former parishioners when curate in the parish of Coutouvre.  He would have known both of them in the ordinary life of the parish, of caring for those in need as well as developing a deep spiritual life. He had seen the role Jeanne-Marie was playing as the parish priest’s right hand person in the up-building of the parish after the trauma of the Revolution.

He would have known of her vocational search, of her disquiet when faced with the invitation to join a cloistered community and the spirit she perceived in the new established communities she knew. She was seeking “a simple life more conformable to that of Jesus and Mary at Nazareth”(RMJ, doc.162#4) . 

Her Coutouvre experience was the key to where her vocational call would lead her.  It was where she found ways of developing a deep intimacy with God without drawing attention to herself; it was where her apostolic zeal was tempered by her desire not to parade her good deeds before others. It is evident that Coutouvre served Jeanne-Marie as the prism through which she saw the type of religious life that would bespeak God’s will for her.  Pierre’s letter was not preserved but evidently he gave her to understand that religious women were also included in the proposed Society of Mary.  I feel it is legitimate to say that in coming to Cerdon, Jeanne-Marie Chavoin and Marie Jotillon were endorsing the Fourvière Promise.  It was on September 6 1826 that Jeanne-Marie Chavoin and eight Sisters made their religious profession before Bishop Devie, thus marking the first formal recognition of a branch of the Society of Mary as a religious Congregation."

The group of Marist Sisters on the renewal course in Manziana is seen here captivating and presenting in an original fashion, some of the characteristics and values of our Foundress about whom Sister Myra is writing in the above extract.

Our Foundress is calling us today to be:
* women of vision,
* women of prayer with a deep love of the Eucharist,
* women of conviction living a prophetic and mystical religious life,
* women of compassion on the side of the poor and oppressed,
* women filled with love of God and love of Mary,
* women desiring to live a simple life style challenging consumerism,
* women open to discern and respond to new apostolic needs in our world of today,
* women striving to:
"think, feel, judge and act as Mary did, forgetting self and placing before our own interests those of Christ and the Church"
(Constitutions 4)