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Catherine-Gérine Fabre (1811-1887)

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She is born on April 22nd 1811 in a poor village of central France, during a time characterized by:

  - deep social and political changes

ü violent opposition between revolutionary and monarchical currents;
ü extraordinary industrial transformation
ü atrocious exploitation of child work
ü complete abandon of education and health matters
ü frenzy migration from rural areas to towns.

- a radical change of mentality: the attention is now drawn to personal profit and to acquiring a wider autonomy at a religious level.

She comes from humble origins. In order of finding some work, her father keeps moving from one place to another and Catherine Gérine is soon forced to abandon school for helping her mother taking care of her younger brothers; in fact she is the second of seven children.

As a young girl she gets to know the Dominican lay movement and so starts to be regularly present in it together with her sisters. Shortly afterwards she joins the fraternity of Chaudes-Aigues, a little site renowned for its thermal baths; here, she accompanies, visits and takes care of sick people. Now, whenever someone joined these lay fraternities it was custom for this person to change his name of baptism and to pick another one: so is for Catherine-Gérine who chooses to be simply called Gérine.

During her long walks on the road to and from Chaudes-Aigues she uses to stop inside a small sanctuary dedicated to Our Lady where she likes to contemplate the “Piety”. Just in front of this representation of  Mary holding in her arms Jesus’ tortured and lifeless body, surrounded by silence and prayer, Gérine’s heart is struck open by deep furrows of compassion and she feels emerging from her soul the desire of letting poor people become the mean by whom she could lay down her life to her Lord.

In 1842 she moves to Toulouse where she founds the first Dominican community of the Third Order, formed by several women living together at the service of sick people, praying and sharing St. Dominic’s spirituality. Notwithstanding all obstacles that may be typical of every new reality’s erection and beginnings, the communities begin to spread rapidly.

Assured and encouraged in her Dominican vocation by Fr. Lacordaire, sensible to the revival of the Dominican Order in France, Gérine will make of St. Dominic’s fundamental experience the core of the inspiration that would stand at the base of her communities and their apostolic mission.  

Since 1852 and once settled in Albi, she gradually applies herself to giving form and organization to the Congregation of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena that will finally receive its official acknowledgment in 1865; so Gérine takes up the role of “guide and mother” for all the sisters who join her family.

In just a few years’ time various new communities of sisters are founded in Italy and Latin America.  

Gérine wants her Congregation to look upon St. Catherine, a XIVth century’s woman from Siena, belonging she too to the Dominicans of the Third Order, as its “Companion and Teacher”, because in this way all her daughters would be able to draw, from the depths of Catherine’s life and writings, the lymph capable of nourishing their essence of Dominican women amidst the world.

On September 3rd 1879, due to historical and ecclesiastical reasons, M. Gérine formally renounces to her responsibility for the control and organisation of the Congregation, presenting her resignation to the bishop of Albi.

So, every day, all through eight long years, she experiments on her very own flesh the mystery of the Cross. She takes it upon her as an unconditioned act of faith. She ends her earthly life in an almost utter solitude in Carcassonne on December 31st 1887; nonetheless, this very sufferance and seclusion will become the “wide open space” through which God the Merciful will “provide” and “sow” his Life in abundance.

 


© Suore Domenicane di Santa Caterina da Siena - Rome, Via degli Artisti 17- Italy