Congregation of the Immaculate Conception
The Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, otherwise known as the "Conceptionists", was founded in 1484 at Toledo, Spain, by Beatrice of Silva, sister of Blessed Amadeus of Portugal.
[1] Candidates for the priesthood were ordained in Saratov by the Bishop of Tiraspol, who was the ecclesiastical superior of the Catholic Church in Georgia; for a time they filled parish duties as secular priests, after which they were appointed by the congregation to a post where they might minister to their countrymen.
[1] According to Father Christopher Zugger, nine Servite missionaries from Constantinople, headed by Exarch Shio Batmanishvili, came to the Democratic Republic of Georgia to permanently establish the Byzantine Rite in Old Georgian there, and by 1929 their faithful had grown to 8,000.
[2] Tragically, their mission came to an end with the arrests of Exarch Shio and his priests by the Soviet secret police in 1928, their imprisonment in the Gulag at Solovki prison camp, and their subsequent murder by Joseph Stalin's NKVD at Sandarmokh[3] in 1937.
[4] Founded at Jodoigne, in 1833, definitively established at Champion near Namur (also in Belgium) in 1836, by Canon Jean-Baptiste-Victor Kinet, for the instruction of children, the care of orphan asylums and the service of the sick and prisoners.
About 230 sisters taught in these convents, the English novitiate being at Rock Ferry, Cheshire, the other English houses: at Great Prescot Street, London, E.; Leeds; Sicklinghall, Yorkshire; Stockport; Macclesfield; Stalybridge; Woodford, Essex; Ramsgate; Liscard, Cheshire; Birkenhead; also in Wrexham, Wales; and in Leith, Scotland.
Twenty years after Pope Pius IX's Apostolic Constitution, Ineffabilis Deus, the Archdiocese of New Orleans's second indigenous religious congregation of women was founded, as the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.
In the 2007 film, The Church on Dauphine Street (by Ann Hedreen and Rustin Thompson), their former mother-house, the Immaculate Conception Convent, is featured.
