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Comme leur fondateur, Jérôme LeRoyer de la Dauversière, homme de prière et d’action, ces six femmes religieuses hospitalières, «ces envoyées du ciel», comme les appelait le vicaire-général de l’époque, ont commencé dans le soin des lépreux parmi nous les soins hospitaliers qui ont essaimé dans toutes les Maritimes.
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«With this time of the seasons, when the harvest brings joy to many, our region wishes to celebrate on this September 21, the 135th anniversary of the arrival of the Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph as the best harvest ever. We want to celebrate the arrival of those women who wrote the most beautiful page of our history by taking care of the lepers. They were six nuns who initiated the care of lepers and who made of those sick people the miraculously cured of our history. By leaving Montreal in 1868, Mother Pagé, the nuns, Viger known as St-Jean-de-Goto, Quesnel, Breault, Bonin, and Fournier, known as Lumina, took on the leprosy plague that could have completely wiped out a population. Like their founder, Jérôme LeRoyer de la Dauversière, a man of prayer and actions, those six nuns, «those heavenly sent women», as they were referred to by the vicar- general of the era, started in the care of lepers in our midst, hospital care that expanded throughout the Maritimes. They awakened in the sick the Christian sense of accepted sufferance, deeply rooted in the mystery of Easter. Thanks to those nuns, experiencing the mystery of the love of God through those rejects of society, the lepers would no longer be the objects of curiosity, but persons to love, to accompany and to cure. Those women, armed above all with the skills of the heart, brought back those marginalized beings on the road of human and Christian dignity.
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