Sacramentine Nuns
SACRAMENTINE NUNS
(OSS, Official Catholic Directory, #3490); officially known as the Religious of the Order of the Blessed Sacrament and of Our Lady, probably the first community established specifically for the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. It is a cloistered, contemplative order whose members take solemn vows and have papal enclosure. The order was begun at Marseilles, France, in 1639 by Antoine Le Quieu, OP (1601–76), but not officially established until 1659 when it was canonically erected by the bishop of Marseilles. Papal approbation was granted in 1693 by Innocent XII. Each monastery is autonomous.
During the French Revolution, 13 Sacramentines of the Bollène monastery were guillotined at Orange. They were beatified in 1925 (see orange, martyrs of). When the anticlerical laws of 1901 forced the nuns to leave their monastery at Bernay, France, they found refuge in Belgium. Some of the exiled religious came to the U.S. in 1912 and were accepted into the Archdiocese of New York, where they founded a monastery in Yonkers. In 1951 a second monastery was established in Conway, MI, by seven religious from Yonkers. The Yonkers community moved to Scarsdale, NY, in 1998.
[m. m. brogan/eds.]