Today, November 10, 2020, we celebrate our IHM Founders Day. We jubilantly praise and thank God for this very SPECIAL Founders Day, as we rejoice in our 175th. Anniversary as a Religious Congregation. With deep gratitude we remember our Co-Founders, Rev. Louis Florent Gillet, a Redemptorist Priest, and Mother Theresa Maxis, one of our first Sisters. Mother Maria Alma Ryan, I.H.M. recounts: “On the morning of November 10, 1845, the three women (Mary Maxis, Charlotte Martha Schaaf, and Therese Renauld) met in the Church (in Monroe, Michigan) to attend Holy Mass celebrated by Father Gillet for the guidance of the project so dear to all of them. After Mass he returned to the sanctuary in surplice and stole, offered a prayer of oblation and rested the stole upon the shoulder of each.” (Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary 1845-1967.)
Pictured with the Founders’ photos are treasured artifacts. Mother Theresa’s Rosary was saved after Mother’s death in Villa Maria, West Chester on January 14, 1892. Father Gillet’s Rosary was sent from a Cistercian Monastery in Hautecombe, France after his death there on November 14, 1892. The small log cabin is a replica of the original foundation log cabin in Monroe, Michigan.
Obviously, further research will fill in the gaps of the mysteries and the miracles of this foundation, moving forward to the present day reality under the guidance and protection of Divine Providence!
Photos:
“Louis Gillet, Who Is Like Fire”
1997 Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Monroe, Michigan
Iconographer: Nancy Lee Smith, IHM
Photographer: Jim Wedlake
“Mother Theresa Maxis, The Holder of the Fire”
1995 Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Monroe, Michigan
Iconographer: Nancy Lee Smith, IHM
Photographer: William Glaab