Catherine Fabre (Mother Gérine) was born on 22 April 1811 in a poor village of southern France, during a time characterized by:

- profound social and political changes;

ü violent conflict between revolutionaries and monarchists
ü extraordinary industrial development
ü fierce exploitation of manual labourers and children
ü complete neglect of education and healthcare
ü frenzied migration from rural areas to towns.

- a radical change of mentality: the pursuit of individual profit, and struggle for greater religious freedom

She came from a humble family. Her father moved from place to place to find work, and Catherine soon had to abandon school to help care for her younger brothers and sisters; she was the second of seven children.

On her long walks on the road between her village and the small thermal town of Chaudes-Aigues, she would visit a small sanctuary dedicated to Our Lady, where she loved to contemplate the Pietà. Rapt in silent prayer before this representation of  Mary holding in her arms Jesus’ disfigured and lifeless body, her heart was opened into deep furrows of compassion, from which sprang the ardent desire of  helping others in their need as her way of giving her life to the Lord.

She came to know the Dominican Tertiary movement, and attended its meetings with her sisters and mother. Aged nineteen, she left home to join the Dominican lay fraternity at Chaudes-Aigues, taking the name Marguerite-Gérine; here for twelve years she accompanied, visited and cared for the sick who came to the thermal baths.

In 1842 she moved to Toulouse and founded a new regular community of Dominican Tertiaries, women living together in the light of St Dominic’s spirituality and dedicated to the service of the sick and to prayer. In spite of the difficulties which attend all births and beginnings, the communities began to spread rapidly.

Confirmed and encouraged in her Dominican vocation by Fr. Lacordaire, who re-established the Dominican Order in France, Gérine made St. Dominic’s founding vision the primary inspiration for her communities and their apostolic mission.

After settling in Albi in 1852, Gérine gradually gave form and organisation to the Congregation of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena, which was officially recognised in 1865; as Superior General she became “guide and mother” for all the sisters who came to join her family.

In the course of a few years, new communities of sisters were founded in Italy and Latin America.

Gérine wished her Congregation to take St. Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth century Dominican Tertiary, as “Companion and Teacher”, so that from the profound depths of Catherine’s life and writings all her daughters would be able to draw nourishment and inspiration for being Dominican women at the heart of the world.

On 3 September 1879, for historical and ecclesiastical reasons, M. Gérine relinquished her task of leading the Congregation, and gave her formal resignation to the Archbishop of Albi.

For the next eight long years she lived the mystery of the Cross in her own person, accepting it in an unconditional act of faith. She ended her earthly life in almost total exile at Carcassonne on 31 December 1887; but her very sufferings and isolation became a “wide open space” in which the God of Mercy would provide and sow his Life in abundance.