Marie-Marthe-Baptistine Tamisier

Marie-Marthe-Baptistine Tamisier (1 November 1834 in Tours – 20 June 1910 in Tours) was the lay organiser of a number of International Eucharistic Congresses in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Historical context The rise of liberal free-thinking in France during the second half of the 18th century, which led to the French Revolution, continued throughout the reign of Napoleon. As a result, fifty years of neglect eventually took its toll, and in the 1840s a number of movements, predominantly local initiatives amongst lay female worshippers, were set up to restore the material fittings of churches in Northern France and Belgium. Under the guidance of the Papal Nuncio, Count Gioacchino Pecci (later Pope Leo XIII), Anna, the eldest daughter of the Belgian Minister of Finance, Count Ferdinand de Meeus, set up an unofficial Sisterhood which acquired a very old Eucharistic chapel in Brussels as its base. This established a link between the restoration of the Church as a matter of repentance and Eucharistic adoration, and the support of the local Cardinals soon set a full-fledged revival going.

At the same time, the creation of the railway network in the second quarter of the 19th century facilitated the mobility of the general population, and one beneficiary of this was religion. In the UK, Thomas Cook started his business in support of adherents to a revival in religious fundamentalism, and pilgrimage similarly became a much easier proposition for French Catholics.

Life Mlle Tamisier was born at Tours, 1 November, 1834. In 1847 she became a pupil of the Religious of the Sacred Heart at Marmoutier, remaining there four years, and thereafter fell into the circle of Peter Julian Eymard, a priest from Lyon who had changed the orientation of his vocation towards Eucharistic worship. This was however a period during which the Rissorgimento had virtually frozen all overt Vatican activity, and much irregular activity was approved at Diocesional levels. Following the death of the latter in 1868, in 1871 she moved to Ars in eastern France in the hopes that the supernatural powers of vocational discernment associated with the Blessed Jean Vianney, a friend of Eymard's who lived and is buried there, would guide her. Coming under the direction of Abbé Chevrier of Lyon, with the help of Mgr de Ségur and François-Marie-Benjamin Richard de la Vergne, then Bishop of Belley, in 1873 she started organising pilgrimages to sanctuaries where Eucharistic miracles had taken place, and their success led to Eucharistic congresses. Her initial plan was to hold this in Liège, the origin of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the 13th Century, but Belgian political machinations made this impossible. Her privations early in life took their toll, and she then effectively retired to Issoudun. All her spare means, though often depriving herself, she devoted to the education of poor aspirants to the priesthood.