MONTPETIT, MARIE-EUGÉNIE-ODILE (1833-1872)

MONTPETIT, MARIE-EUGÉNIE-ODILE, Sister St Stanislas of the Congregation of Notre Dame; teacher and first superior at Newcastle, 1869-70; b. St-Ignace de Soulanges, Lower Canada, 5 Aug 1833, d/o Pierre Montpetit and Henriette Bissonnette; entered religious life, 1849; d. Montreal, 14 May 1872.

During the first twenty years of her religious career M-Eugénie Odile Montpetit taught in several convent schools, worked as assistant mistress of novices for her order, and served as superior of the convent at St Jean, Que. In 1869 she arrived in Newcastle as head of a party of three to conduct a Catholic girls' school. She and her colleagues had been sent in response to a request made by Bishop James Rogers for the CND to establish a successor school to the one which had been conducted at Newcastle between 1864 and 1869 by the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul (Mary Joseph Ennis, Cecilia Noonan, and Angela Mackay).

The CND members who accompanied Montpetit were Julie Kemner dit Laflamme (Sister St Eleanor) and Mary Catherine Purcell (Sister St Beatrice). Laflamme stayed less than a year because of the difficulty which she experienced learning English. Due to the onset of a serious illness Montpetit's stay was not much lengthier. Severe migraine headaches, pleurisy, and long periods during which she was unable to leave her bed resulted in her being recalled to the mother house in Montreal. She was critically ill in November 1871 and died six months later, at age thirty-eight.