Our story begins to take shape in the heart of a XIX^th century’s French young woman: Catherine- Gérine Fabre. A woman with a certainly limited academic education, but who let herself be caught up in life’s harsh reality, in God’s Mystery and in a violated and neglected humanity. By a long-lasting contemplation of Our Lady of the “Piety”, she discovers how much “Love is not loved” and she feels herself called to serve all those who are straying away from God and living in a precarious condition and in need: this would then be the mean through which she would offer her life to the Lord and to the preaching of his Merciful Love.

Permeated by this desire, Gérine Fabre looks for a way of embodying it and sharing it with her other companions. In the experience of St. Dominic’s life and in his spirituality she finds the inspiration that will trace her path. So she initially joins the Dominican Third Order, but afterwards, wanting to remain faithful to her desire and in order of responding to the signs of her time, she decides to found a new religious Congregation in southern France and to entrust it to Saint Catherine of Siena as its inspiring figure and guide: Catherine would well show the sisters how they could reveal the Dominican feminine trait up to the farthest end of the world.

It only takes a few years for the number of communities to increase greatly, and Mother Gérine, with that typical courage showed by all those who retain complete and unique trust in God’s power, sends her sisters to Italy, Uruguay and Argentina, notwithstanding the precariousness of the means of transport of those times…

The religious Family she founded, once separated in two different Congregations since 1879, continued its mission following two parallel paths until the year 2005, when the two branches were reunified.

In line with the daybreak of its foundation, our Family, after having received the gift of the Union, contemplates with awe the birth of a different modality of living Mother Gérine’s Dominican charisma: the particular dimension concerning lay people.

As we begin treading in joy and humbleness on this new path, attentive to the call that the Lord lays in the depths of everyone’s heart, we ALTOGETHER want to preach the passion and the nearness of our Father’s Mercy to all people living in our time and in all four continents where we are present.