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Blessed Marie Poussepin

24 January
14 October on some calendars

Profile

Daughter of a stocking manufacturer, Marie was raised in a pious household and educated by her mother and the local parish priest. Her mother died when Marie was 22, at which point she took over running the house and raising her younger siblings. When her father died in 1683 she took over his business, modernizing it by bringing in machinery to do work previously done by hand; Marie learned to run all the machines, trained her employees, and set up one of the first support networks of benefits for them. She joined the Dominican tertiaries in 1690, and began transferring business responsibility to her brother Charles. President of the local Confraternity of Charity, an affiliate of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in 1693 and 1694, and began caring for people in her home. In 1695 she moved to Sainville, France where she founded a house that would become the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin (Dominicans of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin); the community received legal recognition in 1724, diocesan approval in 1738, and they continue their good works today.