An Ursuline nun and the first bishop of Quebec have been declared Canada’s newest saints.

They are Marie de l'Incarnation, a French Ursuline who led a group of nuns to Quebec in 1639, and Francois de Laval, who arrived in Quebec in 1659 and became the colony’s first bishop. A third saint in the Americas, Jose de Anchieta, a Spanish-born Jesuit who traveled to Brazil in 1553, was also canonized on April 2, 2014.

For more about Bishop Laval, see this story from the February-March 2008 issue of The Beaver (now Canada's History magazine).

Marie de l'Incarnation established the Ursuline Order in New France and founded North America’s first school for girls. The boarding school taught the daughters of Aboriginals as well as French colonists.

Marie mastered local Aboriginal languages and composed dictionaries in Algonquin and Iroquois. She also left behind detailed accounts of events taking place in the colony. Her writing remains an important source for the history of the French colony from 1639 to her death in 1672.

Among the events she witnessed was a massive earthquake on February 5, 1663. It struck with such ferocity that many people believed it was the end of the world.

In a letter, Marie wrote: The weather was very calm and serene … when a sound of terrifying rumbling was heard in the distance, as if a great many carriages were speeding wildly over the cobblestones.This noise had scarcely caught the attention then there was heard under the earth and on the earth and from all sides what seemed a horrifying confusion of waves and billows. There was a sound like hail on the roofs, in the granaries and in the rooms. Thick dust flew from all sides. Doors opened of themselves. Others, which were open, closed. The bells of all our churches and the chimes of our clocks pealed quite alone, and steeples and houses shook like tresses in the wind — all this in a horrible confusion of overturning furniture, falling stones, parting floors, and splitting walls. Amidst all this the domestic animals were heard howling. Some ran out of their houses; others ran in. In a word, we were all so frightened we believed it was the even of Judgment, since all the portents were to be seen.

No greater safety was to be found without than within, for we at once realized by the movement of the earth — which trembled under our feet like agitated waves under a shallop — that it was an earthquake. Some hugged the trees, which clashed together, causing them no less horror than the houses they had left; others clung to stumps, the movements of which struck them roughly in the chest. …. Amidst all these terrors we did not know where the whole thing would end.