Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph

[2] Le Royer collaborated in the administration of the old Maison Dieu (House of God), where the sick poor received care.

When her father remarried, the girl went to live with her aunt, Catherine de Goubitz, at her manor in Ruigné, near La Flèche.

[3] Le Royer founded the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph (RHSJ) with Marie de la Ferre in 1636.

In May 1636, Marie de la Ferre and Anne Foureau formed a community at the Hotel-Dieu with three servants of the poor already on site.

They founded hospitals at Kingston, Ontario in 1845; Athabaskaville, near Quebec City, in 1881; Campbellton, New Brunswick, in 1889; and in Burlington, Vermont in the United States in 1894.

Le Royer founded centers at Ville-Marie, now Montreal, for education and a hospital, where care would be given by sisters of the new order.

In 1659, three Sisters from Laval, Judith Moreau de Brésoles, Catherine Mace and Marie Maillet were chosen for the first community of Hospitallers of St. Joseph in Montreal in New France to work at the hospital.

Since its establishment in Canada, the RHSJ has set up a number of hospitals, schools and other facilities during the period of increased immigration and growth beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.

In addition to ill and dying patients, Hotel Dieu cared for 100 orphaned children who had lost their parents.

[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).

[11] Responding to recent immigration from the United States, the RHSJ established the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in 1888 at Windsor, Ontario.

At that time, they were fleeing oppressive conditions in the South, where whites had regained control of state legislatures and in many areas used intimidation and force to keep blacks away from the polls.