There are now in France, under the name and patronage of Saint Joseph alone, one hundred and seventeen congregations and communities of women.

Among so many appellations, consisting of special watchwords designating and summing up the particular preferences of a devout group, one name is significant there are seventy-nine congregations or communities of women which have devoted themselves to the heart of Mary or of Jesus or to both together.[5354] In this way, besides the narrow devotion which is attached to the corporeal emblem, a tender piety pursues and attains its supreme end, the mute converse of the soul, not with the dim Infinite, the indifferent Almighty who acts through general laws, but with a person, a divine person clothed with the vesture of humanity and who has not discarded it, who has lived, suffered and loved, who still loves, who, in glory above, welcomes there the effusions of his faithful souls and who returns love for love.
All this is incomprehensible, bizarre or even repulsive to the public at large, and still more so to the vulgar.

It sees in religion only what is very plain, a government; and in France, it has already had enough of government temporally; add a complementary one on the spiritual side and that will be more and too much.

Alongside of the tax-collector and the gendarme in uniform, the peasant, the workman and the common citizen encounter the cure in his cassock who, in the name of the Church, as with the other two in the name of the State, gives him orders and subjects him to rules and regulations.

Now every rule is annoying and the latter more than the others; one is rid of the tax-collector after paying the tax, and of the gendarme when no act is committed against the law; the cure is much more exacting; he interferes in domestic life and in private matters and assumes to govern man entirely.