The Religious Hospitallers of Saint Joseph (also known as Réligieuses hospitalières de Saint-Joseph) was a religious order founded in La Fleche, France by the Venerable Jerome le Royer de la Dauversiere and Venerable Marie de la Ferre. Le Royer helped administer the "Maison Dieu" in the village and was inspired to found an order to care for the sick poor.[1]
Next he had a vision to found centers at Ville Marie, now Montreal, for education and a hospital, where care would be given by sisters of the new order.[2] (The order is not related to the Sisters of Saint Joseph).
Le Royer founded the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph (RHSJ) order with Marie de la Ferre in 1636. He sponsored Paul de Chomedey and Jeanne Mance, a lay woman, to go to Ville Marie with French colonists to evangelize the Natives and establish a hospital (Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal) to care for the poor.[3] Mance founded it in Montréal in 1642. After the order was established, three sisters: Judith Moreau de Brésoles, Catherine Mace and Marie Maillet, went to Montréal in 1659 to work at the hospital. That year the RHSJ received letters patent from King Louis XIV to take over the hospital and its operations.
Since its establishment in Canada, the RHSJ has responded to many critical needs and changing requirements of varied populations. It set up numerous hospitals, schools and other facilities during the long period of increased immigration and growth beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1845 the RHSJ order established the Hotel Dieu in Kingston, Ontario. Their services were critical when the city suffered an epidemic of typhus in 1847. At the hospital, they cared for 100 orphaned children who had lost their parents. The disease had accompanied poor Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in their homeland. No one yet understood how the disease spread, and poor sanitation practices compounded the epidemic. [4]
In the nineteenth century, the RHSJ also established an Hotel Dieu and convent school in New Brunswick at each of three towns: Tracadie (1868), Chatham (1869), and Saint-Basile (1873). The sisters were influential in establishing medical and nursing care in these communities, as well as schools for the education of children.[5]
Responding to recent immigration from the United States, the RHSJ established the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in 1888 at Windsor, Ontario. They were invited to come by Dean T. Wagner, pastor of St. Alphonsus Church, who was concerned that black immigrants from the United States' South were not being adequately served by other community institutions. For instance, black children were denied entry to white schools. Many had arrived as part of the late nineteenth century-early twentieth century Great Migration to the North out of the South. The RHSJ founded a hospital for the town, and a school for black children.[6]
The RHSJ continued to expand to new sites. They founded hospitals at Athabaskaville, near Quebec City, in 1881; Campbellton, New Brunswick, in 1889; and in Burlington, Vermont in the United States in 1894.[7] In 1897 the RHSJ founded a Hotel Dieu at Cornwall, Ontario. There they eventually had a large complex of facilities, including a school, nurses training school, nursing facility, etc. In the twentieth century, the order reorganized to integrate its people from Canada, the United States and France. The generalate is located in Canada, in keeping with its chief area of activity.