The Congregation of Our Lady of Fidelity (French: Congrégation Notre-Dame de Fidelité) is a Catholic religious congregation of women founded in France in 1831 by Henriette Le Forestier d'Osseville, known in religion as Mother Saint Mary, which has as its primary goal the education of young women, especially orphans.
D'Osseville, who was to become the foundress of the congregation, was born in 1803 in Rouen, Normandy, to Count Théodose Le Forestier d’Osseville, the Receiver general of Calvados, and his wife, Anne Renée de Valori, the daughter of the Seigneur of Montauban.
Subsequently, she and her father visited the most ancient Marian shrine in Normandy, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Deliverance (La Déliverande) in Douvres, to give thanks to God and the Blessed Virgin for this.
Her father declared to her during that visit that, "I shall die happy only if a pious work is to remain at La Deliverande as a perpetual living ex-voto in gratitude for what I owe to God.
"[2] Inspired by these words, D'Osseville began to feel that she herself might provide the answer to her father's prayer through establishing some way of helping the hordes of children left impoverished and orphaned by the devastation of the nation in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, a cause that had already struck her heart.
Consequently, in September of that year D'Osseville set sail from France with 18 Sisters bound for England with the intention to establish an orphanage and school in Upper Norwood, a sheltered neighborhood of London.
[2] In 1851 D'Osseville returned to the motherhouse in Douvres, where she assumed the position of Superior, though she insisted on living with the orphan girls who were cared for there.