The Miraculous Life and Afterlife of Charlene Richard

During this sainthood boom, the United States, which has the fourth-largest Catholic population of any nation, has been left out. No U.S. cause was opened before the late 19th century, and only one native-born citizen has been sainted: the Philadelphian heiress Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000. Three naturalized American citizens have been sainted, Saint Mother Teresa was an honorary citizen, and several “American” saints were born before 1776 or were foreign citizens living abroad, but this wider draw only emphasizes the scale of the underrepresentation. Canonization is, quite explicitly, a symbolic gesture, meant to draw attention to a heroic virtue, an act of martyrdom, a community. Symbolically speaking, American Catholics have been shafted.

Though there are currently more than 80 American candidates for sainthood, the Acadian community has a special claim to Roman sympathies. Its Catholic population descends from what Cajuns call “le grand dérangement”: the British Army’s expulsion of about 7,000 French Catholics from Nova Scotia in 1755 during the French and Indian War, tearing apart families and killing more than half the population. One of the largest bands of refugees arrived in Southwestern Louisiana in 1765, led by Bonnie’s ancestors, the brothers Joseph and Alexandre Broussard.

“Sainthood links the local church to the universal church,” says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, who wrote “A Saint of Our Own,” about the more than century-old campaign for a patron saint of the United States (leading contenders include St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Kateri Tekakwitha, though each was born before the country’s founding). “The story of the Acadians is the story of how a persecuted minority was transplanted here and created a new culture. Charlene’s significance extends beyond the world of sainthood. It’s a profoundly American story.”

Since 1985, however, the Acadian story has endured a different great derangement. In May of that year Jason Berry published in The Times of Acadiana and The National Catholic Reporter his investigation into pedophilia charges against Gilbert Gauthe. Berry would later extend his reporting into a trilogy of books that tracked a series of pedophilia cases in the Diocese of Lafayette into the innermost sancta of the Vatican, revealing widespread patterns of abuse and corruption. According to data from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, more than 7,000 clerics have now been “credibly” or “not implausibly” accused of sexually abusing minors in the United States alone.

The evolution of Broussard’s relationship with the church corresponded to a broader shift that occurred in Acadiana during the 1990s, as the Gauthe case spurred dozens of other allegations within the region. Though Broussard grew disenchanted with the corruption of the clerical hierarchy, she did not consider abandoning her faith; instead she redirected her devotion to the angelic child who, she was certain, sat at the foot of God.

The diocese, during this time, showed little interest in Charlene. Even the local clergy tended to dismiss the phenomenon, despite the efforts of Brennan and Calais, who continued to ferry parishioners to Charlene’s grave, use her story in fund-raising pleas and give interviews. “In my eyes and in the eyes of many, many people, Charlene Richard is already a saint,” Brennan told The Catholic Digest. “We’re just waiting for the church to catch up.” Calais still struggles to understand his peers’ disinterest. “There were priests who thought me and Father Brennan were crazy,” he says. These included, he said, his successor at St. Edward, the Rev. Stanley Begnaud, who has been labeled a “known pedophile” in church documents and is the subject of a lawsuit filed in 2020. (Begnaud died in 1985.)

With no foreseeable path to canonization, the Friends of Charlene held meetings less often, then not at all. “Nothing had happened for 10 years, and people just wondered whether anything ever would happen,” Broussard says. “That was the hardest time, just to keep it going.” By 1999, the only remaining founding member of the organization, the oilman Steven Vincent, told Broussard that he was leaving, too. He asked her to take over as president. She accepted without hesitation. “I felt that there was something here,” she says. People traveled to the annual Mass from all over the world to testify to miracles Charlene had performed from beyond the grave. “That’s what kept me going,” Broussard says. “All these people came for a reason.”