Where did the IHMs come from?

There’s so much I want to tell you about, but I want to start at the beginning because it’s a great story. The Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the IHMs as we’re often called, come from an unlikely meeting of Rev. Louis Florent Gillet, a zealous Belgian Redemptorist priest in Michigan and Marie Almaide Duchemin, a founding member of of America’s first African American community of sisters in Baltimore, Maryland. Gillet, who spoke French, occasionally celebrated Mass for the Oblates as he traveled through Baltimore since the sisters, most of whom came from Santa Domingue (present day Haiti) spoke French.  He wanted to establish a school for French Canadian immigrants in Monroe, Michigan.   He wrote in a letter to a friend, “If I can’t find sisters, I will make sisters.”  On one trip to Baltimore he invited Duchemin to leave her community and help him found a new school and a new community of sisters in Michigan.  An agonizing decision faced her. At this time in 1845 it seemed likely that the Oblate community would be dissolved because of the racism in pre-Civil War Baltimore and an unsupportive new bishop. So she accepted Gillet’s invitation and made a serious change of identity. She was a light-skinned mulatto, born of her Santa Domingan mother, a servant in a rich Baltimore home, and a visiting British friend of the family.  As she left Baltimore she took on a new identity.  She “passed” as Sr. Theresa Maxis, taking the surname of her Santa Domingan grandfather.

The new community began with Theresa and two other sisters. They established an excellent school and soon attracted other women to join them. However within fifteen years, the Redemptorist priests had left; there were  conflicts with the bishop; Theresa opened a new convent and school in Pennsylvania; and the bishop forbade her to come back to Monroe or even to have any contact with the sisters there. The amazing thing is that in spite of all these setbacks the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary grew into three strong communities of IHMs, one in Michigan and two in Pennsylvania.

This is only a thumb nail sketch of the beginning of our story. I just always wonder at what God does through ordinary folks who take his call seriously. That gives us all a lot of hope.