Overview
- St. Julia Billiart’s feast, observed Wednesday, highlights the life of the educator who founded the Sisters of Our Lady of Namur.
- As a young woman, she and her father were attacked by gunmen, and she lived with paralysis for 22 years.
- From her sickbed she taught children, then in Amiens worked with Francisca Blin de Borbón and Father José Varin to found the Institute of Our Lady to teach and train catechists.
- After a novena in 1804, accounts say she stood and walked, and she went on to open convents in Namur, Ghent and Tournai.
- She died on April 8, 1816 in Namur, and the Church later beatified her in 1906 and canonized her on July 22, 1969.