A study of Marguerite Bourgeoys can do more than help us understand the past. She was a pioneer, a leader in attempts to build a better church and a better society in a world where those two were not really separable. It was a world where she made the welfare of women and children her special concern, one that she believed could be improved if people could learn to understand one another. The worlds in which we lived only yesterday are as irrevocably lost to us as Europe was to the settlers of the seventeenth century who left it for the New World or as pre-Columbian America was to its native peoples once the Europeans had arrived. Though experienced so long ago, the life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in early Montreal can tell us something about meeting the challenges of the present, in which we are all pioneers, and about the need for understanding and compassion, which are no less important now than they were more than three centuries ago.