Celebrating our IHM Founding 179 Years Ago

Our celebration on November 10 at the IHM Center began with prayer and
reflection and concluded with a festive meal. The following are excerpts from our prayer:

“Today we journey back into the lives of our founders, the brave hearts of Sister Theresa Maxis Duchemin and Father Louis Florent Gillet. This remembering creates a heightened awareness of how God’s Holy Spirit breathes in and through the very core of our being. In the remembering we see by way of hindsight how God can work God’s dream for us and for the world.”

A reflective reading from Paths of Daring Deeds of Hope by Margaret Gannon, IHM, reminded us: “Theresa was raised in the African-American community by her mother’s guardians, the Duchemin family, who provided education for her as they did for her mother. She attended a school established for Haitian refugee children on Paca Street in Baltimore. In 1829 the women who conducted the school, Elizabeth Lange, Maria Magdalene Balas, and Marie Rose Boegue decided to form a religious congregation under the guidance of James Joubert, a Sulpician priest. Theresa obtained permission to become the fourth founding member of the Oblates of Providence. The congregation prospered until after Father Joubert’s death when the less sympathetic church leaders looked unfavorably on the existence of an African-American congregation… During these threatening days, when the Congregation was ordered not to receive any new candidates, Theresa was visited by Louis Florent Gillet, a Belgian Redemptorist working in the Detroit Diocese. He invited her to join him in the establishment of a new congregation to work among the French and English-speaking population of Monroe Michigan. Theresa left the Oblates and Baltimore in 1845 and traveled to Monroe and to the founding of a new congregation of women religious, the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

“In a continually shifting society, the IHM Sisters of Scranton have always sought to meet the needs of God’s people. From the early years our sisters have reached out to farmers, miners, immigrants, orphans, the sick and homeless, women and children. We now add to that the global concerns of today. Carrying the fire of God deep in our hearts, we continue to carry the Good News of God’s copious love to all with the same zeal as our founders.”

“Theresa and Louis were great-souled visionaries with an acute sensitivity to the urgent needs of their times and an unremitting orientation to life and to the future. Their zeal for mission, generosity of spirit, courage, resourcefulness, and confidence in God’s loving providence enabled them to convert dreams to deeds. They were prophets of vision and pilgrims of a dream. In the depths of their hearts, they realized that for those who love, the impossible becomes possible.”

“On this Founders’ Day, we rejoice in the lives of Theresa Maxis, Louis Gillet, and all our sisters and associates who have gone before us. May their witness to God’s unconditional love set our hearts on fire with love for God and all creation. This is our hope and our prayer for the future. May Mary, the first disciple and our model of a life rooted in God, accompany us on this journey that we make together in the name of her son, Jesus, and for the sake of all God’s people. Amen.”