Story

Our Congregation was founded on June 3, 1856 in Tielt in Flanders, by three sisters from the same family: Rosalie, Henriette and Mélanie Van Biervliet, who already in 1829 created a boarding school for young girls with a view to earning a living and “to do good “. Their sister Virginie remained with them and she had collaborated in the foundation of the congregation but without having consecrated herself in religious life. This boarding school quickly gained a great reputation thanks to their gift for education, their creative project, their innovative program. The quality of their work was such that the Bishop of Bruges insisted that they start the first private normal school for girls in West Flanders in 1849.

A long period of maturation preceded the founding of the Congregation during which the Van Biervliet sisters had already expressed their desire to become nuns. In 1856, they finally realized their wish and bequeathed to the nascent Congregation, a flourishing work of education, the family spirit which characterized both their personal life and that of their educational work and a spirituality having as its biblical foundation the mystery of Nazareth. .

From 1862 to 1903, schools with boarding schools were created in various cities in Belgium, Brussels, Louvain, Antwerp.

In 1896, the first sisters crossed the Atlantic to resume in the capital of Guatemala, the charitable work that a former pupil of Tielt had begun there. It is the beginning of a presence in Central America where currently the Congregation is inserted in Guatemala. For a period, it was in Mexico in the region of Oaxaca and today it is in Honduras.

In 1932, it was the opening to Africa in Kivu in the east of the DR Congo, at the request of a missionary father from Africa and the Bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of the time. This humble beginning is followed by several other insertions located in Kivu, Kinshasa, Rwanda and Kigali, with an episode in the Far North of Cameroon (diocese of Maroua) which had to be left following insecurity due to BokoHaram . Recently, two new communities have sprung up in Mozambique. Thus the little shoot born in Tielt grew and became a tree with many branches.