Blessed Odile Baumgarten, DC

Odile Baumgarten, whose family name is sometimes printed in a Frenchified form as Baugard, was born in Gondrexange in Lorraine in 1750. She was the fourth child of a miller; the three children born before her all died in infancy. At the age of 24 she became a postulant for the Daughters of Charity in Metz, the main city in her native province of Lorraine. Her first appointment was to a hospital in Brest, but seven months after her arrival there the hospital was destroyed by fire. She was then transferred to St John’s Hospital in Angers. She was put in charge of the pharmacy.

Blessed Marie-Anne Vaillot, DC

Marie-Anne Vaillot was born in Fontainebleau in 1734, the daughter of a stonemason. At the age of 27 she entered the Daughters of Charity in Paris. Her fourth appointment was to St John’s Hospital in Angers.

St John’s Hospital in Angers

This hospital was dedicated to St John the Evangelist. It was built towards the end of the 12^th century by the representative of the English king, Henry II, in the province of Anjou. It was very generously supported financially by King Henry II as part of his reparation for the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket by the king’s knights. In 1639 the administration of the hospital was confided to the Daughters of Charity. It is historically important as being the first hospital ever entrusted to the care of the Daughters of Charity.

Up to the end of 1790 the revolution had hardly any effect on St John’s Hospital, though the sisters there received letters from Paris and learnt what was happening in the capital. But early in 1791 they began to feel the pressures exerted by the terms of the oath of loyalty to the civil constitution of the clergy. They were forced to close the chapel in the hospital in April and were forbidden to keep as their confessor a local Parish Priest, because he had not taken the oath. Sister Antoinette Taillade, the superior, made an official protest about this matter of their confessor, and the municipal authorities changed their mind and recorded in the minutes of one of their meetings that the sisters of the hospital might go to any priest of their choice as confessor. However, all priests who had refused to take the oath, with the exception of priests who were sick or who were over the age of sixty, were arrested and the law of deportation was applied to them. Two hundred and sixty-four priests from Angers were exiled because of this law. The municipal authorities appointed two priests, who had taken the oath, to be chaplains to the hospital. The sisters left it entirely to the patients in the hospital to decide whether they would accept the ministrations of these two priests or not. The sisters themselves, though, did not avail themselves of their ministry. They were able, though not frequently, to meet with two priests who had not taken the oath. One of these was Jacques Devaux, who had been formerly the Vincentian superior in Angers. He was sixty-eight years old. The other was a diocesan priest named Gruget, aged forty. Both of these men risked their lives to provide this ministry to the sisters. Devaux died of natural causes in February 1793. Gruget managed to conduct a secret ministry all through the revolutionary period without being captured, and he did not die until 1840. He left much important written material about the revolutionary period in Angers.

From August 1792 a new oath was demanded by law, the oath to uphold Liberty and Equality. It was obligatory for everybody holding State employment, and refusal to take the oath meant loss of salary. After April 1793 the penalty was deportation to the penal colony in French Guyana, in South America. From October 3, 1793 the oath became obligatory for all members of female religious congregations. The wording of the formula of the oath was somewhat loose and a number of persons took it, giving themselves the benefit of a benign interpretation of the words. Others were permitted to take the oath after they had explained what they understood it to mean. Later on this tolerance was discontinued.

The official implementation of the law suppressing religious communities and the wearing of the religious habit came into force on 10 August 1792.

On 29 December 1793 the Convention passed a new law obliging all “girls or women belonging to the former congregations or religious orders of their sex” to take the oath of Liberty and Equality within the next ten days. Refusal to take the oath would mean being deprived of salary, being expelled from their place of residence and “being regarded as suspect, and treated accordingly”. This became known in Angers on January 5, 1794, and the authorities notified the sisters, and pointed out that refusal to take the oath would be “formal disobedience to the law and would perhaps bring down on them very severe penalties”. Officials went to the hospital on several successive days and interviewed the sisters in small groups. Three sisters promised to take the oath, and on January 19 they did so at a public ceremony. The minutes of the proceedings, after recording the oath-taking ceremony, go on to state that many more sisters would have taken the oath were it not for “the perfidious suggestion and evil resolutions of the afore-mentioned Antoinette, Superioress, Marie-Anne and Odile”. And so, for the first time, Marie-Anne and Odile appear on the scene as named individuals. Up to this the sisters were usually mentioned as a group, and not as individuals. The minutes of the meeting recommend that these three be removed from the hospital. Antoinette Taillade, the superior, Marie-Anne and Odile were singled out from the other thirty-six sisters who worked in the hospital, because Antoinette was superior, and the other two were regarded as the strongest opponents of the revolutionary ideas, and were believed to have influenced many other sisters in the hospital to resist what the civil authorities wanted to do.

The three were immediately arrested, but there was a shortage of prison accommodation because of the huge number of persons who had been arrested under the various laws of the period. Almost all the religious houses in Angers had been confiscated and turned into prisons. The three Daughters of Charity were held in the Calvary convent until January 21. On that date Marie-Anne and Odile were separated from Antoinette, and were moved to the Good Shepherd convent. In an account written at the time, and which has survived, it was stated that the authorities hoped that the superior, Antoinette, could be persuaded to take the oath and then encourage the rest of the community to do so. Marie-Anne and Odile were to be made an example of what refusal to take the oath would mean. Father Gruget, mentioned earlier, thought that perhaps the authorities felt that if the superior was executed the three sisters who had already taken the oath might publicly renounce the oath.

On January 28 Marie-Anne and Odile were interrogated in the Good Shepherd convent. The hand-written minutes of the interrogation of prisoners in the Good Shepherd convent on 2 Pluviôse of Year II of the republican calendar, which was January 28, 1794, devote nine lines to Marie-Anne and nine more to “Audile Bangard”. Marie-Anne stated that she was arrested because “she ‘had not taken the oath, did not want to take it; she was not afraid of being disposed of, no matter how.’ From her answers it can be seen quite clearly that she is a fanatic and in rebellion against the laws of her country. She was never present at the Mass of a priest who had taken the oath”. In the left margin of the page there is the letter “F”, indicating that she was to be executed by la fusillade, the firing squad. Almost the same words are used about Odile, and she also has an “F” in the margin. The Good Shepherd nuns, who had taken the oath, were present at the interrogation and wrote a more detailed account of it later on.

The execution squad operated inside the enclosure of a former priory about two kilometers outside Angers, which is now known as the Martyrs’ Field. Executions had taken place there on the 12, 15, 18, 20, 21 and 22 of January 1794. The condemned persons were tied in pairs to a central rope and were marched from the prisons to the place. Those who could not walk were taken in carts. Marie-Anne and Odile were scheduled for execution on February 1. There were further executions on February 10 and April 16, bringing the total number executed in Angers to more than two thousand. A contemporary account of the journey to the place of execution tells us that on the way Marie-Anne started the Litany of Our Lady, which was then taken up by all the prisoners as they went along.

The procession to the place of execution was accompanied by a military band, and some of the more ardent revolutionaries went to see the spectacle. They often referred to the execution days as the happiest days of their lives. At the place of execution the victims were lined up in front of the firing squad. There was only one single discharge of muskets by the squad, and those who were not killed by it were finished off by either sword or bayonet. Odile was hit by several bullets and died immediately. Marie-Anne received only a broken arm from a bullet, and she held Odile in her arms. There is nothing on record to say exactly how she was killed, but it would have been by either a sword or a bayonet.

At the ceremony in Rome on February 19, 1984 Pope John Paul II beatified ninety-nine persons who died for the faith in Angers. In his homily he had to speak in general terms because of this large number, but he did make mention of some of them by name. He said that Marie-Anne comforted Odile by saying:

“We will have the happiness of seeing God and possessing him for all eternity…and we will be possessed by him without fear of being ever separated from him.”