This “Industrial Revolution” flocked young country boys and girls to Troyes for work in the factories and textile mills.

[2] Assisting Fr Brisson in the “Oeuvres Ouvrières”, were lay women, such as the young lady, Léonie Aviat, whom he met when she was a boarder at the Convent School of the Visitation.

As this apostolate developed, Father Brisson gave it greater stability by founding a female religious congregation, the Oblate Sisters of Saint Francis de Sales, whose purpose was to help the working girls to keep their dignity and to become women of conscience and faith.

Fr Brisson, died on February 2, 1908, in Plancy In 1911, Pope Pius X approved the constitutions of the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales.

They remains of the founders, Saint Léonie Aviat and Blessed Louis Brisson are buried in the crypt chapel of the Oblate Sisters’ Motherhouse in Troyes.

When the Vicar Apostolic of Cape of Good Hope, Bishop John Leonard, heard that the Society of African Missions of Lyons had decided to recall its subjects from Namaqualand and the North Western Cape, he made a trip to Europe in 1880 in hopes of finding a Congregation willing to assume the responsibility of evangelizing these districts.

In May 1910, a convent was found in Manta and in 1930, after long hard efforts and expectations, the sisters opened a school for girls.

The sisters began working at the Leonie Aviat school in the Tarqui administrative district in Manta Canton, Ecuador, in 1960.

In 1950, Mother Jeanne de Sales visited the Manta convent and school in South America and stopped in the United States to see the Oblate Provincial, Fr.

Within a year, Sister Bertha Gonzaga and her companions arrived from France and were living in a small house on the property of the Oblate Fathers’ novitiate in Childs, Maryland.

In 2019, the Sisters' arrived in Towson, Maryland to further their apostolate work at Immaculate Heart of Mary Parochial School.