Mother Suzanne Aubert 1835 - 1860

The birth of Suzanne Aubert on 19 June 1835 coincides closely with the birth of the Society of Mary as a missionary congregation to the South Pacific and especially to New Zealand, where Vicar Apostolic Jean-Baptiste Pompallier established the mission’s headquarters in 1838 and where Suzanne would arrive in 1860 to live over sixty years of dedication and love.

The close bond between the developing societies of the western Pacific and age-old Christian Lyon is an important aspect of nineteenth-century Catholic history and of Pacific history in general. From all around the Lyon area, men and women gave themselves willingly to a hardworking and practical life of mission in isolated islands on the other side of the globe. The life of Suzanne Aubert not only represents but also surpasses in heroic virtues the experience and contribution of most others; she is an exemplar par excellence of French Catholic mission to the world in an age when France contributed eighty percent of Catholic missioners.

Suzanne Aubert is extraordinary for the way she understood and identified with her adopted country. She is honoured highly both by the Church in New Zealand and by the country as a whole. In 1926 multi-denominational, secular New Zealand paid her respect with a funeral almost at state level and has continued to recognise her with other marks of national distinction. She lives on very securely in the history and heart of the nation. Therefore, the formative experiences from her familial, religious and social milieu in France on the one hand, and the significant steps in New Zealand’s emergence as a bicultural democratic society on the other, provide essential context in evaluating the ongoing legacy of this servant of God.

In 1835, Suzanne’s birth year, Aotearoa-New Zealand was still an independent, strongly tribal Polynesian society. Its relative proximity, however, to the new penal colony of New South Wales, its magnificent timber forests and excellent harbour facilities made it a major destination for Pacific shipping. Maori were also engaged in commerce with Port Jackson (Sydney) and other Australian settlements, as well as further afield, especially in the whaling industry. The growing naval and mercantile interest of France in this area was one reason behind the decision by a group of paramount northern chiefs to sign a Declaration of Independence in 1835 in which they requested Great Britain to protect their independence, notably against possible French incursions.

The five years between this event and the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi – the crucial founding document of modern New Zealand – also saw the 1835 recognition of the Society of Mary by Pope Gregory XVI who immediately gave it responsibility for Catholic evangelisation in Western Oceania. The first Marist missionaries left in 1836 under Lyonnais Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier as Vicar Apostolic, some being placed en route in Wallis and Futuna while Bishop Pompallier and the two remaining men arrived in New Zealand in December 1838.

They were at a disadvantage relative to Anglican (Church Missionary Society) and Wesleyan missionaries who had arrived as early as 1814, and they were greeted with hostility by these British Protestants on religious grounds as Catholic and on political grounds as French. They had at first no well-established mission stations with the patronage of chiefs, and the process of catching up as speedily as possible would prove to be a big drain on mission funds. Nevertheless, Pompallier’s intelligence, diplomacy, handsome bearing and ability to comprehend indigenous cultural values, coupled with the Marist mission’s disavowal of interest in gaining vast tracks of land –which Protestant missionaries were beginning to buy for their growing families – won him considerable backing from chiefs placed in strategic trading areas. The sincerity and perseverance of the French Marists, despite the daunting challenges they faced, won respect.

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and the majority of chiefs brought New Zealand under the effective sovereignty of Great Britain. The Catholic mission led by Pompallier is honoured in the history of this treaty for their championing of an inclusion of a clause allowing freedom of religion. The treaty spelled the end of France’s possible strategic interests. The country was henceforth destined to be primarily English-speaking, but its Catholic missionaries continued for many years to be largely French, although progressively joined, naturally, by Irish clergy for the incoming migrants of the Irish diaspora. This strong French foundation has had a significant influence on the expression of Catholicism in New Zealand.

For Pompallier and the Marists, the task of compressing into five or so years the twenty-four years of prior Protestant missionary consolidation brought irreconcilable strains to bear on their relationship, both within New Zealand and in France, significantly between Pompallier as leader of the mission and Fr Jean-Claude Colin as head of the Marists and spiritual leader of the missionaries. By the end of the 1840s, Rome had attempted to resolve the situation by separating Pompallier from the Marists, dividing the country into two dioceses, with Pompallier as bishop of a largely diocesan clergy in Auckland, while Marist Philippe Viard, also from Lyon, became Bishop of Wellington with the Society of Mary supplying his clergy but not Pompallier’s.

Meanwhile, back in France, part of the mission fervour of Lyon and its surrounding towns and villages was fuelled by the experiences of all these local Marist missionaries now out in the Pacific, who were supported by the prayers and funding of lay societies, especially the Association of the Propagation of the Faith, founded in Lyon under the inspiration of Lyonnaise Pauline Jaricot. Suzanne Aubert grew up in this environment.

Marie Henriette Suzanne Aubert came from a typical bourgeois family of the mid-nineteenth century. It was a closely-knit family centred originally on the outlying muslin-spinning town of Tarare and the smaller town of Lay to the north west of Lyon. But Suzanne’s parents, Louis and Clarice Aubert, moved to Lyon from her birthplace, Lay, when she was only five years old and she lived close to the ancient church of St Nizier, her parish church, until she left for New Zealand twenty years later.

On both sides of her family most of the men were engaged in secular administration as lawyers, court registrars and bailiffs while some were involved with the textile industries of the region; the women were well-educated, accomplished in the arts, and devout supporters of the church-based welfare systems. Some were religious sisters, including two paternal aunts who were Benedictine nuns of the abbeys of Pradines and La Rochette in Lyon, where Suzanne received education and Benedictine spirituality.

Suzanne was the second of four children born close in age. Her older brother Alphonse would eventually marry and the descendants of one of his two sons now have close links with the Sisters of Compassion. A younger brother, Louis, was disabled and died at the age of twelve. This, and a traumatic accident Suzanne herself suffered when about two years old and which apparently left her for some years crippled and disfigured, explain much of her identification with the disabled in life and her later work on their behalf.

Suzanne’s empathy with children in need and her views on their care and upbringing were influenced by another family experience too, as well as by the beliefs and example of her grandmother in this area of welfare. She remembered with regret that her youngest brother, Camille, lived the first four years of his life in foster care in the country and she held reservations in later life about fostering as a general system, believing that in some situations children were not sufficiently nurtured spiritually and psychologically.

Camille’s absence from the family circle during his infancy was most probably explained not only by the fact that Louis’s and Suzanne’s childhood disabilities were then absorbing their mother’s attention and energy, but also because at that time Clarice Aubert was herself very ill. Suzanne’s mother’s ill health was suddenly reversed in 1845 by a documented miracle cure at the shrine of Fourvière. A commemorative votive painting is in the collection of the Musée de Fourvière, along with the two doctors’ attestations. This event would reinforce in ten-year-old Suzanne the growing Marian devotion of mid-century France and strengthen already existing family links with the local congregation founded for Mary, the Marists.

In the same year, 1845, another local woman from Lyon, Françoise Perroton, left for the Pacific on her own initiative and at an advanced age of forty-nine; she was pioneering Marist women missionaries’ contribution to Western Oceania. When Suzanne’s early wish to be a nursing Sister of Charity proved impossible, she began to consider joining these forerunners of the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary. She was encouraged in this by Jean-Marie Vianney, parish priest of the rural village of Ars, whose ascetic sanctity and powers of prescience were greatly revered at the time. Suzanne would always treasure in her memory certain predictions he gave her, which were confirmed in later life. In 1917 Rome, to honour her devotion to Jean-Marie Vianney and even before his official canonisation in 1925, declared him a patron saint of the new pontifical New Zealand congregation, the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion, whose name features prominently among the inscriptions behind the altar in the basilica at Ars.

Despite being unable to follow a nursing vocation with the Sisters of Charity (she recalled helping them, as a volunteer, to nurse cholera patients and wounded Crimean soldiers), Suzanne continued in Lyon with private studies in healthcare, chemistry, botany and pharmacy. Very early on in her time in New Zealand she gained a high reputation for her skills in medicine, and this continued to grow throughout her life.

Her parents, especially her father, were opposed to their only daughter entering religious life. She respected their wishes until she was approaching twenty-five when her age of maturity coincided with the Marists’ formation of the first group of Third Order of Mary women to go out to the Pacific to join Françoise Perroton. She was attracted to their active missionary goals and one of their main Marist promoters, Fr François Yardin, was her spiritual director at this time. But in 1859 a return visit of Bishop Pompallier to recruit people for his Auckland Diocese would send her to New Zealand instead.

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