'Too robust to be saint'. Female congregation founders in 19th-century Belgium: double-voiced agency, religious entrepreneurship and gender tension.

Although the nineteenth century has been labelled an age of progressive secularisation in Western Europe, passionate piety, religious organisations and religiously inspired charity were prominent features of the time. In Belgium and several other Western-European countries, this catholic 'religious revival' of the second third of the century was characterised by a tremendous increase in the numbers and the social apostolate of active female congregations, inspiring some historians to refer to the nineteenth century not as the 'Age of Secularisation' but as the 'Century of the Nun' (McLeod). For a long time the fascinating history of these active female religious was a 'terra incognita', hidden behind a double curtain of the religious mantra of modesty and anonymity on the one hand and the dominance of male and institutional Church history on the other. The historical neglect was delusive, because within the specific nineteenth-century Belgian context of the revival, enterprising, headstrong and gifted religious women found opportunities as well as challenges for religious and social female agency. With an in-depth, comparative and contextual biographical study of four female congregation founders in nineteenth-century Belgium, this study brings these women to prominence. Antoinette Cornet (1820-1886), Anna de Meeûs (1823-1904), Fanny Kestre (1824-1882) and Wilhelmina Telghuys (1824-1907) belonged to the same generation of nineteenth-century catholic women and shared positions as female founders of apostolic female congregations in the archdiocese of Mechelen in the final decades of the revival (1850-1870). Butcher's daughter Cornet founded in 1863, after a turbulent history in a failing convent, her own congregation of teaching sisters, the Soeurs du S. Coeur de Marie in the small village of La Hulpe, south of Brussels. De Meeûs, daughter of a rich, influential and recently ennobled Brussels banker and statesman, was the founder in 1857 of the Institut de l'Adoration Perpétuelle (1857), a semi-apostolic congregation in the Belgian capital, focusing on religious instruction, retreats and the devotion for the Blessed Sacrament. Kestre, from more modest decent than de Meeûs, founded in 1867 the Dames de Sainte‐Julienne‐Apostolines du Saint Sacrament, with a similar mission of religious instruction and devotion for the Blessed Sacrament. Telghuys (1824-1907), born in a wealthy Dutch-Belgian family of traders, founded in Antwerp, the other large city of the archdiocese, the Dienstmaagden van de Heilige Harten van Jezus en Maria (1864), a congregation providing education and care to orphans and vulnerable women as well as hosting a semi-industrial and lucrative laundry business. Their life stories being exceptionally well documented, the study makes a broad analysis of the ideas, motivations and ambitions, the strategies and the failures and accomplishments of these women. Inspired by the ethos of penance and retribution and social action characterising the early, romantic revival, they engaged as ambitious dames d'oeuvres or young female religious into a life of social and religious engagement and female agency. As congregation founders and female superiors they turned to the rigid and militant mentality and crusade of ultramontane Catholicism of the second half of the nineteenth century. Driven by the desire to re-establish a Christian society they fought on the barricades of the Belgian 'culture war' between Catholics and liberals and tried - with varying success - to integrate their organisational and entrepreneurial skills within the 'battle modus' of the Church. From the 1870s onwards these religious women were also a vital link in the developing social discourse and action of Catholicism. Throughout all these evolutions, the four female congregation founders balanced difficultly on the complex scale of women's emancipation. On the one hand they took pioneering initiatives to improve the life conditions, education and spiritual well-being of women or to facilitate their participation in social and religious action. On the other hand they were ardent supporters and promotors of the dominant catholic and bourgeois model of submissive, self-denying and humble women. The study is not limited, however, to the four women as intriguing or influential figures within the nineteenth-century church and society. Their lives are placed within a strong relational and comparative framework. An analysis is made of their gendered relationships with male clerics and church authorities in Belgium and Rome and shows a multilayered image of emotional and spiritual partnerships, balancing between desire and control, authority and empathy, sincerity and opportunism. The key concept to untangle this complex clerical and gender bonds were the 'double voiced' strategies that underscored the women's behavior, discourse and actions. By stressing their obedient and submissive state, they could create space and opportunity to accomplish their own ambitions, without changing existing gender or clerical patterns. The life stories of the four women were also confronted with the family and social networks they were engaged in. Firstly, it unveiled interesting parallels between (family) fortune, clerical and social needs and successful female agency and, inversely, between financial restraints and failure. Secondly, the comparative study of their interactions with female lay benefactors and friends pointed to complex and evolving relationships, from soulmates over allies, to rivals and oppressors. Finally, the four superiors are analysed as leaders of female convents, with governance styles that varied from gentle, but naïve companionship to mere dictatorship. Confronting the study of the four women with Belgian and international research on other female founders and lay women of their time the conclusion is made that as female founders and superiors of apostolic congregations they could be part of a powerful, but small, exclusive and conditional social niche of religiously inspired women. Stimulated by the Belgian context of revivalist, ultramontane and social Catholicism, they played an important role in the male dominated church and society and created opportunities for female development. But their influential position and female action came at a double price. Literally, they bought their prominent roles with family fortune or at the expense of orphans and vulnerable women working hard in their apostolic institutions. In a figurative, but even more fundamental, sense, they confirmed the inequality of women to men within and without clerical boundaries. By promoting obedience, submission and self-denying as virtuous female capacities to their pupils, orphans, women under their care and female associates and imposing it on their own subordinate sisters these women maintained a restrictive framework of female modesty.status: publishe

Human blood outgrowth endothelial cells improve islet survival and function when co-transplanted in a mouse model of diabetes

AIMS/HYPOTHESIS: As current islet-transplantation protocols suffer from significant graft loss and dysfunction, strategies to sustain the long-term benefits of this therapy are required. Rapid and adequate oxygen and nutrient delivery by blood vessels improves islet engraftment and function. The present report evaluated a potentially beneficial effect of adult human blood outgrowth endothelial cells (BOEC) on islet graft vascularisation and function. METHODS: Human BOEC, 5 × 10(5), were co-transplanted with a rat marginal-islet graft under the kidney capsule of hyperglycaemic NOD severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) mice, and the effect on metabolic outcome was evaluated. RESULTS: Although vessel density remained unaffected, co-transplantation of islets with BOEC resulted in a significant and specific improvement of glycaemia and increased plasma C-peptide. Moreover, in contrast to control mice, BOEC recipients displayed reduced beta cell death and increases in body weight, beta cell proliferation and graft-vessel and beta cell volume. In vivo cell tracing demonstrated that BOEC remain at the site of transplantation and do not expand. The potential clinical applicability was underscored by the observed metabolic benefit of co-transplanting islets with BOEC derived from a type 1 diabetes patient. CONCLUSIONS/INTERPRETATION: The present data support the use of autologous BOEC in translational studies that aim to improve current islet-transplantation protocols for the treatment of brittle type 1 diabetes.status: publishe