Émilie Tavernier Gamelin (19 February 1800 – 23 September 1851) was a Canadian social worker and Roman Catholic religious sister. She is best known as the founder of the Sisters of Providence of Montreal. In 2001 she was beatified by Pope John Paul II.
Early life
She was born Marie-Émilie-Eugène Tavernier (also known as Amélie) on 19 February 1800 in Montreal, the youngest of the 15 children of Antoine Tavernier and Marie-Josephe Maurice. Nine of her siblings died before reaching adulthood. Gamelin's mother died in 1804 when Gamelin was aged 4 and her father died in 1814 when Gamelin was aged 14. Consequently, Gamelin was raised by her aunt Marie-Anne Tavernier and her husband Joseph Perrault, to whose care Gamelin's mother had entrusted Émilie prior to her death. Gamelin shared the Perrault household with her aunt and uncle and their four children.
From 1814 to 1815, Gamelin boarded at the school run by the Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame, before returning to the Perrault household. In 1818 Gamelin moved to the house of her brother François, whose wife had recently died, to care for him. When she returned to the Perrault household in 1819, her aunt, now old and infirm, put Émilie under the care of her daughter Agathe (born 1787), who became a third mother to her.
At the age of 19, while caring for her aunt, Gamelin spent time as a debutante in Montreal fashionable society and was frequently seen at the social events of the city. Between 1820 and 1822 Gamelin spent two stretches residing with one of her cousins, Julie Perrault, in Quebec City, ending in 1822 when Gamelin's aunt, Marie-Anne, died, resulting in Gamelin and her cousin Agathe Perrault moving together into a house in Montreal West. In a letter to Agathe dated 18 June 1822, Gamelin wrote that she felt "a strong vocation [...] for the convent. [...] I renounce for ever the young dandies and also the [vanities of this] world; I shall become a religious some time in the autumn."
Despite her interest in consecrated life, on 4 June 1823 Marie-Émilie married Jean-Baptiste Gamelin, a fifty-year-old bachelor of Montreal who made a living dealing in apples. The marriage lasted four years ending with Jean-Baptiste's death on 1 October 1827. Gamelin had three children by the marriage: two died shortly after birth and the third died within a year of her husband.
Charitable works
After the death of her husband, to assuage her grief Gamelin took an interest in charitable works. In 1827 she was guided by her spiritual director, Jean-Baptiste Bréguier dit Saint-Pierre, to pray to Our Lady of Seven Dolors and to join two groups organized by the Sulpician Fathers. These groups were the Confraternity of the Public Good, which arranged work for the unemployed, and the Ladies of Charity, a group aimed at relieving poverty and destitution through home visits and the distribution of alms. In 1828 she also joined the Confraternity of the Holy Family, a group dedicated to the spiritual growth of its members and the spreading of the Roman Catholic faith. For a short period in 1829 she also worked with Agathe-Henriette Huguet-Latour's organization, the Charitable Institution for Female Penitents. While working with these groups, Gamelin gradually divested herself of her financial assets, funnelling the proceeds into the charities with which she was working.
From her home visits, the young widow had been struck by the misery in which single and isolated elderly women lived. As a result, in 1829, Gamelin took four of these frail and sick elderly women into her own home on the Rue Saint-Antoine. By 1830 she had decided that larger premises were needed to care for them, and on 4 March 1830 she opened a shelter for frail or sick elderly women in Montreal on the corner of Rue Saint-Laurent and Rue Sainte-Catherine, in the Saint Lawrence district, near the homes of many of her relatives. The building for the shelter was provided by the Abbé Claude Fay, parish priest of the Church of Notre-Dame in Montreal. In 1831 the shelter moved to a larger building rented by Gamelin at the corner of Rue Saint-Lawrence and Rue Saint-Philippe. At the time of the move, the new building housed 15 boarders, with a maximum capacity of 20, and also provided a residence for Gamelin. The shelter expanded until in 1836 it again required larger premises. On 14 March 1836 a house on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine and Rue Lacroix was donated by Antoine-Olivier Berthelet, a wealthy philanthropist, and shortly thereafter the shelter moved to these new premises, called the "Yellow House". By this time, Gamelin had 24 women as her co-workers in her work.