St. Marguerite Bays

Marguerite Bays was born on September 8, 1815, in La Pierraz, a hamlet in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, the third of seven children in a peasant family. From an early age she showed a quiet attraction to prayer and to the sacraments, and she was drawn to a life centered on Christ rather than on marriage. After completing what little schooling was available to her, she became an apprentice seamstress and eventually set up as a dressmaker, an ordinary trade that she would practice for the rest of her life. Her ordinary trade, however, was matched by an extraordinary interior life: she is said to have made long visits to the Blessed Sacrament as a young girl, often spending hours in church before going home to her work.

Marguerite lived in the parish of La Fontainte and later Siviriez, supporting herself and her family through her sewing while teaching catechism to children, visiting the sick, and quietly helping the poor. Reports from her contemporaries describe her as cheerful and unassuming, never drawing attention to her hidden ascetical life, which reportedly included fasting, wearing a small hidden cilice, and rising for long hours of night prayer. She did not enter religious life; instead, she remained a laywoman in the world, an example of consecrated life in ordinary circumstances that would later make her a model for lay apostles.

In July 1854, at the age of thirty-eight, Marguerite was diagnosed with an aggressive intestinal cancer. According to her biographers, on December 8, 1854 — the very day on which Pope Pius IX solemnly defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception — she was suddenly and inexplicably cured. (Some accounts place the miraculous healing on August 21, 1858, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so the exact date appears uncertain in the sources.) On that same December 8 in 1854, she also reportedly received the visible stigmata, the five wounds of Christ, which she would bear for the remaining twenty-five years of her life and which bled especially on Fridays and during Holy Week. She bore these wounds without display, covering her hands with gloves and her feet with stockings, telling only her spiritual director. Despite the fame that the stigmata brought her — pilgrims began coming to Siviriez to see and pray with her — Marguerite continued her work as a seamstress and her rounds of catechesis and charity until her health finally declined. She died on June 27, 1879, in Siviriez, after a long period of suffering. She was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1969 and canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1975, confirming in the universal Church what the Swiss faithful had long believed about this humble seamstress-mystic. Today she is venerated as a patron of seamstresses and of laypeople who seek holiness in ordinary work, and her feast is kept on June 27.