Saint Jeanne Jugan

Saint Jeanne Jugan, in religion Sister Mary of the Cross, was a French religious and the foundress of the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Poor, which takes poor elderly people into its homes. The Church commemorates her on August 29.

She was born on October 25, 1792, in the hamlet of Petites-Croix near Cancale in Brittany, during the French Revolution. She was the sixth of eight children. Her father, a fisherman, was lost at sea when she was four. She never went to school; she learned to read and write together with the catechism from the tertiaries of Saint John Eudes. At fifteen she went into service with a well-to-do family and, together with the lady of the house, visited the needy.

She turned down a proposal of marriage, saying that God was keeping her for a work not yet founded. In 1817 she joined the Third Order of Saint John Eudes and worked as an aide in the hospital at Saint-Servan; afterward, for twelve years, she served a friend who was also a tertiary, until the woman’s death. In the winter of 1839, at forty-seven, she took in a blind and infirm old woman. She gave her her own bed and went to sleep in the attic herself.

Young women soon joined her, and in 1840 the small community elected Jeanne as its superior. In 1842, with no money, she bought a ruined former convent, where forty elderly people soon found a home. With a basket on her arm she went through the streets begging for alms, basing the whole work on trust in Providence. In 1845 the French Academy awarded her the Montyon Prize.

Meanwhile, in 1843, the sisters reelected her as superior, but Father Le Pailleur, the community’s spiritual director, annulled the election on his own authority and appointed a twenty-one-year-old sister in her place. Jeanne accepted this without protest and went on begging for the poor. In 1844 she took the name Mary of the Cross. In 1852 the Bishop of Rennes approved the congregation, and Father Le Pailleur, appointed superior general, recalled her permanently to the motherhouse.

For the last twenty-seven years of her life she remained in the shadows, from 1856 at La Tour Saint-Joseph in Saint-Pern, among the novices, many of whom did not know that she had founded the congregation. She would tell them, “Be little, very little,” and “Look upon the poor with compassion, and Jesus will look kindly upon you on your last day.” She died there on August 29, 1879, when the congregation already numbered 2,400 sisters. For a long time Father Le Pailleur was taken for its founder; the truth about its beginnings came to light only later.

John Paul II beatified her on October 3, 1982, saying that God could not have glorified a humbler servant. Benedict XVI canonized her on October 11, 2009, and called her a beacon for societies that must always rediscover the place and value of old age.