Léonie Aviat

The work of Léonie Aviat is inseparable from the foundation of the Oblate Sisters of Saint Francis de Sales. Touched by the condition of young girls employed in the spinning mills and factories of Troyes, who were exposed to moral and material misery, she joined the project of Father Louis Brisson, who wished to offer them homes, youth centers, and instruction. The congregation was canonically erected starting with the taking of the habit on October 30, 1868. The Oblates opened homes for workers, youth centers, schools, and boarding schools, training young women to become, according to the Salesian spirit, apostles of charity in their workplace and their families. Elected Superior General in 1872, and again in 1893, Mother Françoise de Sales directed the expansion of the institute well beyond France: the congregation established itself in Switzerland, Italy, Austria, England, America, and even in the missions of Southern Africa. A woman of action as much as of prayer, she ensured the sisters' fidelity to the ideal of Saint Francis de Sales, founded on gentleness, humility, and self-forgetfulness in the service of the poorest.

The holiness of Léonie Aviat is nourished by the spirituality of Saint Francis de Sales, received at the Visitation of Troyes from Mother Marie de Sales Chappuis and Father Brisson. Her spiritual path is summarized in a motto she had adopted: "Forget everything about oneself," an expression of a radical renunciation of self to seek only the divine will and the good of one's neighbor. Her contemporaries highlight her gentleness, her charity, and a constant humility, lived amidst the heavy responsibilities of Superior General and the trials of persecution. She received from Mother Chappuis the advice to place all her desires in God and to do His divine will in everything, a principle that guided her entire existence. Far from any self-promotion, she strove to remain hidden, attentive to the interior formation of her sisters and the concrete service of young working women. This reputation for holiness, founded on daily fidelity and a spirit of service, spread immediately after her death within the congregation and led to the opening of her cause.

The process for the beatification of Léonie Aviat was opened in Perugia in 1929. Pope John Paul II beatified her on September 27, 1992, and then solemnly canonized her in Rome on November 25, 2001. The miracle accepted for her cause concerns the healing of Bernadette McKenzie, a young American from Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, who was suffering from a serious spinal condition that had left her bedridden after several unsuccessful surgical interventions: her family, her school, and her parish, joined by thousands of people, undertook a novena to Mother Léonie Françoise de Sales, at the end of which the young girl recovered her health. According to Church sources, this healing was recognized as inexplicable and attributed to the intercession of the foundress. The liturgical feast of Saint Léonie Françoise de Sales Aviat is set for January 10, the anniversary of her death in Perugia in 1914. She is honored more particularly by the Congregation of the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales and within the Salesian spiritual family.

The legacy of Saint Léonie Aviat continues primarily through the congregation she co-founded and governed, the Oblate Sisters of Saint Francis de Sales, whose mission remains centered on education, the protection of children and youth, and the dissemination of Salesian spirituality. At the turn of the 20th century, the anti-clerical laws of the Third Republic in France forced the religious sisters into exile; Mother Françoise de Sales transferred the motherhouse to Perugia, Italy, around 1903, where the congregation continued its development and obtained the definitive approval of its constitutions by Pope Pius X in 1911. It was in Perugia that she died in 1914 and where her remains rest, venerated by the Oblates. Today, present in several countries in Europe, America, and Africa, the congregation continues to embody her ideal of humility and self-forgetfulness in the service of the most humble. Her figure remains closely associated with that of Father Louis Brisson, himself beatified in 2012 by Benedict XVI, of whom she was the first and closest collaborator in the founding of the Salesian women's institute.