Marie Louise Habets

Marie Louise Habets
Born	January 1905 Egem, West Flanders, Belgium
Died	May 1986 (81 years old) Hawaii, United States
Nationality	Belgian
Other names	Sister Xaverine, S.C.J.M.
Occupation	Nurse and religious sister
Known for	Being the model for the protagonist of the 1956 novel The Nun's Story
Partner(s)	Kathryn Hulme

Marie Louise Habets (January 1905-May 1986) was a Belgian nurse and former religious sister whose life was fictionalised as Sister Luke (Gabrielle van der Mal) in The Nun's Story, a bestselling 1956 book by American author Kathryn Hulme. The Belgian-born actress Audrey Hepburn portrayed Gabrielle van der Mal in the 1959 Fred Zinnemann film The Nun's Story, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Habets was born in the town of Egem in West Flanders during January 1905, and in 1926 entered the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, an enclosed religious order, which cared for the sick and poor within their cloister. She was admitted at their convent on Molenaarstraat in Ghent, and then took the name Sister Xaverine. In 1933 she was sent to the mission hospital her congregation staffed for the Belgian government in the Belgian Congo. She returned to Belgium during the summer of 1939 due to her having contracted tuberculosis, shortly before the start of World War II and the subsequent German invasion of her country. Her father was killed shortly after this. Sister Xaverine developed such a hatred toward Germans that she became involved with the Belgian Resistance. She came to feel that she could not obey the dictates of her faith for forgiveness and applied to the Holy See for a dispensation from her religious vows, a very rare request in that era. She was eventually granted this and left the congregation on 16 August 1944 from their convent in Uccle.

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