Josephine Leroux

Anne-Josepha Leroux was born on 23 January 1747 in Cambrai, France, to devout parents who gave her a Christian upbringing. Her sister Marie (in religion Scholastique) entered the Ursulines of Valenciennes. At about the age of twenty-two Anne-Josepha entered the Poor Clare monastery in Valenciennes, taking the religious name Joséphine (Josephine). She made her profession and lived the enclosed Franciscan life of poverty, prayer, and penance until the Revolution.

When revolutionary laws suppressed religious houses in 1791, the Poor Clares were forced to leave their monastery. Joséphine fled to her family in Mons, in Hainaut, as did her sister. After Austrian forces briefly occupied Valenciennes in 1793, a short interval of peace allowed her return. Finding her own monastery destroyed, she joined her sister at the Ursuline convent, resumed communal religious life, and shared in the work of a religious school.

Revolutionary troops retook the city in 1794. Joséphine was arrested around 1 September with other nuns, charged as returned émigrés who had resumed religious life and Catholic teaching without permission. Condemned for high treason, she was sentenced to death. On 23 October 1794 she was guillotined in Valenciennes together with her sister Scholastique, Ursuline superior Mother Clotilde Paillot, other Ursulines, and Bridgettine companions. Tradition records that the nuns went to the scaffold singing the Litany of Loreto; before dying Joséphine forgave her executioners, kissing their hands, and mounted the scaffold with the calm courage of the early martyrs. Her body was buried in a common grave and never recovered.

Recognized as having died in hatred of the faith, she was beatified by Pope Benedict XV on 13 June 1920 with the Martyrs of Valenciennes. The Church keeps her memory on the anniversary of her death.

May Blessed Joséphine Leroux obtain for us the grace of steadfast fidelity and the courage to forgive those who wrong us.