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In a sense, Sainte Foy is not strictly a place of Marist origin, if we take “origin” as referring to places which the “founders founded”. However, Fr Colin did spend a good deal of time at Sainte Foy and it has a venerable Marist tradition associated with it.

However, the name more appropriately associated with Sainte Foy is that of Father Favre, the second superior general, who had the house built between 1858 and 1860, several years after Fr Colin had resigned as superior general. It was to be the training place for many generations of scholastics, and for about forty novices. The house was the site for ten sessions of General Chapter. Two superiors general, Fr Favre and Fr Martin, died in this house, as Sainte Foy was the seat of the General Administration from 1880 to 1906. A third superior general, Fr Raffin, died in Lyons and is also buried in the vault of Sainte Foy.

Fr Colin at Sainte Foy

Fr Colin spent a good deal of time here, mainly in the Winter months, after his resignation as superior general. He lived in the corner room on the third floor, above the present entrance. Across the corridor, the room marked by the third and fourth windows to the left served as his private chapel.

The month of May 1870 is of particular importance in the story of Fr Colin’s stay at Sainte Foy. Having spent the last months of 1869 completing the Constitutions, he drafted a letter to present the text “to the Fathers and Brothers of the Society of Mary”. Given that Fr Favre had already printed and published his Constitutions, this act of the Founder is a very sensitive one. As well as that, he put together a text on the origins of the Society, which he hoped would put an end to the rumours circulating at the time. This was the document known as the Spiritual Testament of Fr Colin, which was to give rise to such contro­versy in the Society, drawing from Fr Maitrepierre an impassioned letter of eight pages, which was the beginning of what we now refer to as the “Maîtrepierre Controversy”. Maîtrepierre was the one whom Eymard had said “founded the Society spiritually”, in view of the extremely important positions (in particular, novice master) he held in the early years of the Society. Now a rift developed between the one who founded the Society in the normal sense of the word, and the one who had greatly influenced the spiritual formation of the early generations of Marists. Both men were living in the house at the time, and it is sad to think of these two great men, so important to the early history of the Society, living in two corners of the same building, and no longer able to communicate with each other.

However, Sainte Foy was to see happier times in the life of the Founder. It was here that the peace-making Chapter of 1870-72 was held, when the tension between Fr Colin and Fr Favre was resolved. At this Chapter Fr Colin presented his Constitutions. These Constitutions were approved by Rome in 1873, and 105 years later were again adopted as a permanent charter for the Society by the General Chapter of 1977. However, new Constitutions had also to be written in 1985, but these are to be seen and read in the light of Fr Colin’s Constitutions of 1872.

The last moment of Fr Colin’s stay at Sainte Foy is perhaps worth recalling. It occurred during the Chapter of 1873. On the morning of 25 August 1873 Fr Colin appeared among the capitulants and said: “I have seen the Holy Spirit in the midst of your work. I have seen in the midst of you the Blessed Virgin, she who must lead you to the gates of salvation.” He then left Sainte Foy for La Neyliêre, where he was to die in 1875.

(For an extended account of Fr Founder’s farewell from Sainte Foy that day, see A Founder Acts, doc.396.)