Bl. Victoire Rasoamanarivo

Born: c. 1848

Died: August 21, 1894

Feast day: August 21

Rasoamanarivo came of age just as the gospel began penetrating Madagascar. Queen Ranavalona I feared any outside influence within the recently unified island and opposed Christianity. With her death in 1861, French Catholics gained a foothold. Rasoamanarivo entered their new Catholic school at age 13.

As a young girl, she immediately took to the faith, developing a devotion to the Blessed Mother and the rosary, and was baptized on November 1, 1863. She wanted to be a nun but could not. “Providence had decided other-wise,” she said, and she began a long pattern of improvising a role that had no precedent in her society: to be a follower of Jesus and conform her life to his radical call to discipleship.

Rasoamanarivo had the mixed blessing of being part of a family whose prominence was second only to the royal family. Shortly after her baptism, her family pressured her into a political marriage with a powerful non-Catholic cousin. Protestantism gained influence in the upper class, and her family urged her to convert. Rasoamanarivo had no children and was looked down upon. Her family now wanted her to leave her husband because of his alcoholism. She refused and instead prayed for his conversion.

Rasoamanarivo also negotiated war. Tension with the French erupted into the first Franco-Malagasy War. Many Malagasy considered Catholicism to be a foreign faith, and in 1883 the government expelled missionaries and closed the churches. “If you oppose this by force,” Rasoamanarivo told the army guarding the church, “my blood will be the first you will shed.” She opened a church, and, even without clergy, it became the center of the Catholic community.

Rasoamanarivo was vindicated when her husband accepted baptism on his deathbed in 1887. She herself administered the sacrament. For the last nearly seven years of her life, Rasoamanarivo lived as a holy widow, visiting prisoners, caring for lepers, and spending hours in prayer.

Now it was her turn. Like countless Austronesian ancestors, she prepared to embark across new waters. Raising her rosary beads to the sky, she called out, “Mother, Mother, Mother.” Then she set out on her journey to cross the sea of birth and death.

—Damian Costello