Unlike most religious congregations, Marist Missionary Sisters do not claim any founder or foundress except, perhaps, that of Our Lady herself. Rather, there are eleven Pioneers, exceptional women who went out on mission in a way that was unheard of for women of their times. Marie Francoise Perroton was the first Pioneer.

She was 49 when she read the appeal of South Pacific women for teachers, she was 50 when she got there to help, she was 62 when the first European women joined her to start the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary (SMSM). Of the four Marist founders, surely Marie Françoise Perroton was the most amazing.

Marist Fathers and Brothers had arrived in Oceania in 1837. Five years later two women of the Island of Wallis wrote an open letter to the women of Lyons, France, asking for “some devout women (some Sisters) to teach the women of Uvea.” Perroton at the time was a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in Lyons in 1822 by Pauline Jaricot. The Uvean letter was published in the Society’s Annals in September 1843. Perroton read it, took the call personally. She went to see Fr. Peter Julian Eymard, director of the Third Order of Mary. Fr. Peter Chanel had been martyred in 1841, and other difficulties still plagued the missions in the South Pacific. Undeterred, after prayer and discernment, Perroton writes to Auguste Marceau, captain of the “Arche d’Alliance” and a member of the Third Order, to obtain a place on his boat, working for her passage. “My desire is to serve in the Missions for the rest of my life.” With Eymard she makes a final pilgrimage to Fourvière. Around Our Lady’s neck is a golden heart with the names of missionaries; Eymard opens the heart and adds Perroton. Marceau sets out on 15 November 1845. They stop briefly at Tahiti, and Perroton is informed that Eymard has enrolled her in the Third Order of Mary. She personally makes profession in the Third Order only 12 years later, in 1858. The boat finally reaches Wallis (Uvea) on 23 October 1846.

Who is this woman?

Perroton’s origins were poor. She was born in the slums of Lyons. Her father moved from job to job: wigmaker, peddler, haberdasher; he dies when Françoise is fifteen. Her mother worked cloth home, like so many others in this center of French clothmaking. In spite of her poverty Françoise receives a good education with the Sisters of St-Charles, and shows herself an apt student. For years she works at textiles. She and her mother are taken into the Jammot household in 1833, and when her own mother and Mrs. Jammot both die five years later, Mr. Jammot makes Françoise governess. It is a bourgeois family with a wide circle of cultured friends. Intellectuals pass through regularly, including Frédéric Ozanam, Sorbonne expert on Dante and founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Françoise is at ease; she’s intelligent and secure, a good conversationalist with solid judgment and an irrepressible sense of humor.

The times are difficult. The silk-workers are boisterous, new technology is threatening their livelihood. Françoise is a prudent advisor to Mr. Jammot and has a deep Christian concern for the workers. She’s an active member of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, recites the Rosary daily for the Missions, and is a group leader in collecting the weekly sou from members. She assiduously reads the Annals and for many years has seen missionaries off to all corners of the globe. The Uvean letter was God’s catalyst.

Bishop Bataillon on Wallis refused to welcome her. One of the original twenty Marists professed on 24 September 1836, he had left for the missions that same year. “I don’t want any European woman on this island!” He was blatantly sexist. Fortunately the native king offered to protect her. He built her a hut near the ocean and entrusted his daughter Amélie to her, with two of her friends. The four lived in the same hut, with no dividers, sleeping on mats on the ground. Other native women joined them, including Susana, one of the two who had written the letter to Lyons. Later the numbers would rise to 50 and 100 and even 200. For eight years Perroton lived without European women company on Wallis, then she moved to Futuna where Chanel had been killed and lived there likewise for another four. Communication was all by sign and body language. With characteristic humility Perroton wrote: “I thought in 1845 that I was going to do marvels in Oceania… What a disappointment! I was 30 years too old, my old head has been able to grasp very little of the Uvean language. The same thing applies to the Futunian.” But she taught daily by loving presence and action. She always writes that she’s doing nothing, but meanwhile she’s teaching hundreds of girls and women and sharing her life fully with them. Till the day she died, she insisted she had none nothing.

Her pastoral method was prophetic. As a lay person she was not bound by foreign institutional ways. Before rules and regulations, there’s life, cordial human relations, Christian love. Acculturation and indigenization are her trademarks, notably different from the priests and Brothers. She lives as in a family with 15, 20, 50, 100 natives, not as in a boarding school. Her missiology is extraordinary, unconscious, originating in common sense and daily experience, to be fully appreciated only later. Her new model was just what was needed. She is convinced that the way to change society is through the women and children. In the course of the following years missionaries comment on her deep influence, seen in the natives’ more loving care of their family and children.

A few understand what she is all about. Fr. Junillon, a holy priest with vision, builds Françoise a new residence with his own hands in 1850. Also very understanding and supportive, Marist Procurator Victor Poupinel writes frequently from Sydney. Others, though, Bataillon, Matthieu, Dezest, understand little and try to change things their way. Bataillon tells her the Sisters should be farming and raising hogs and helping the priests. At one moment she’s at the end of her rope and ready to resign and return to France, but when a boat does show in 1857, it brings three more young women from France. She stays; in fact, she stays until the end of her life, 27 years, and never again sees her beloved France.

Later, some other young women pioneers joined her, ironically inspired by Bataillon when he had returned to France in 1856 to talk about the missions in Oceania. He was immensely impressive, tall with a flowing beard and booming voice, and within a few months as many as 6000 more people came to support the work of the Propagation of the Faith. Three women returned to Wallis with him in 1857, and more followed in 1858 and 1860. With Perroton they make up the eleven “Pioneers” who, inadvertently at first, formed another branch of the Marist Project: the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary. Their correspondence, amounting to over 800 pages, tells the story of the raw reality of mission life. These women were all rugged and faith-filled individualists. They had to be, for life was extremely difficult with all kinds of tropical diseases and ulcers, abscesses, rheumatisms, fevers, elephantiasis, and daily heat exhaustion. Several had to go to Sydney to be hospitalized and cared for. They learned to go barefoot when shoes wore out. Yet, the Pioneers all clung to three burning desires: to be missionary, to be religious, and to be Marist. Perroton wrote to a friend, with her customary humor, “None of us has ever thrown a bottle or plate at the head of another Sister.” Soon they draw vocations through their open welcome, good example, and holiness.

In 1859 one of Perroton’s legs swells up, eventually the other one also. She has elephantiasis for the last 15 years of her life. It is difficult to get to daily Mass because she can’t climb hills any more. For a year before her death in 1873 she is bed-ridden, but happy to offer all her sufferings for the Church and the Holy Father, persecuted in Italy.

News that her work on Wallis has survived brings her consolation and joy. Two groups have been formed there under Amélie and Susana, and they called them “Arche d’Alliance” and “Lyon” in honor of Françoise. Towards the end of her life Françoise declared, “My 13 years of trial will be counted among my best days. I had never dared hope for so much happiness.” On her tomb are inscribed simply the words: Sister of the Third Order of Mary.

Within two years of Perroton’s death, the Marist Missionary Sisters had spawned a native offshoot on New Caledonia and Vanuatu, the Daughters of Mary, founded by Bishop Vitte and formed by Sr. Marie de la Croix. Then came the Sisters of Our Lady of Nazareth on Fiji, and in the twentieth century the Sisters of Nazareth and the Daughters of Mary Immaculate. All four are diocesan but trained by the Marist Missionary Sisters and inheriting the Marist spirit of the first Pioneers.