A New Approach to Religious Life

Today marks the founding of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in France in 1791. At the height of the French Revolution, Adelaide de Cicé, a French noblewoman, founded this community. What made this community different was that the sisters didn’t wear habits, nor were they known as sisters. To this day they still don’t use the title. While the revolutionary crackdown on the Church was the immediate impetus for this approach, their anonymity (s their vision statement reads) “allows us to penetrate deeply the milieu (times and surroundings) in which we live and serve.” As the communityIn 1851, the Daughters came to America where they opened a school in Cleveland. Locally they established St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf, which started in the Bronx in 1869, and for many years had a Brooklyn annex.