Blessed Marie of the Incarnation (Barbe Acarie), O.C.D.

Life

Barbe Avrillot was born in Paris on 1 February 1566 into a prominent bourgeois family. At sixteen she married Pierre Acarie, a counsellor to the Chambre des Comptes, and bore him six children. Despite a luxurious household, the young Madame Acarie devoted herself to prayer, the works of mercy, and the spiritual direction of an extraordinary circle that gathered at the Hôtel Acarie: Pierre de Bérulle, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Louise de Marillac and many of the leading figures of the French Catholic Reformation passed through her salon. During the famines that followed the Wars of Religion she fed the poor of Paris on a vast scale.

In 1601, on reading the works of Saint Teresa of Ávila in French translation, she experienced a vision of the Spanish reformer and conceived the project that would change French religious life: the introduction of the Discalced Carmel into France. With Bérulle, Brétigny and others she obtained the necessary authorisations from Rome, and in 1604 the first Spanish Carmelites — including Anne of Jesus — arrived in Paris. By her death the new Carmel counted seventeen houses in France.

When Pierre Acarie died in 1613, Barbe at last entered the convent she had founded, taking the habit at the Carmel of Amiens not as a choir nun but as a humble lay sister, with the name Marie of the Incarnation. She made profession in 1615 and was transferred to Pontoise for health reasons, where she died on 18 April 1618. Pope Pius VI signed the decree for her beatification on 24 April 1791 (Easter Sunday) and the beatification was solemnly celebrated at Saint Peter's in Rome on 5 June 1791.