Saint Jeanne Jugan

Someone came to tell her that a blind, paralyzed old woman named Anne Chauvin had just lost her only relative and was lying huddled in a tumbledown shack in the street, about to freeze to death.

That shared bed was the beginning of a great work of charity: the Little Sisters of the Poor, a congregation devoted to caring for the poorest, loneliest and most abandoned elderly people.

Her life is an extraordinary story of humility: she founded a congregation that spread throughout the world, then was stripped of her role as foundress by a priest and left forgotten for twenty-seven years, in complete silence and without a word of complaint.

When Jeanne was only four, her father, Joseph Jugan — the captain of a fishing boat — was lost at sea in a terrible storm. No body, no grave, only the hopeless waiting of a young widow and her small children. Her gentle mother, Marie Forêt, had to rake for clams, gather shellfish and work for hire, struggling alone to feed her children at a time when the French Revolution was fiercely persecuting the Church, when practicing the faith openly could cost your life and priests had to hide and celebrate the sacraments in secret.

From an early age, Jeanne had to herd sheep and help her mother earn their bread. The girl’s faith was nourished by secret Masses said late at night in the holds of fishing boats. Hers was a faith learned not from orderly catechism classes in fine churches, but from the daring, quiet faithfulness of a small community under persecution.

At sixteen, Jeanne went into service as a maid for a devout noblewoman at a nearby manor. The lady saw the young girl’s kindness and often took her along on visits to give medicine to the poor. It was on those visits that the seed of her future mission was quietly sown, though Jeanne was then too young to realize it.

At twenty-five, a handsome, well-off young sailor asked for Jeanne’s hand. Her mother and friends urged her to accept this chance to change her life — for a poor girl of the coast, such a marriage was about the best she could dream of.

No one, not even Jeanne, could imagine at that time what that work “no one has yet done” would be. She only knew to follow a vague, nameless call, trading a secure future for a wholly uncertain road.

In 1817, Jeanne left home and moved to the town of Saint-Servan. She worked at the town hospital for six years, caring for the sick poor until she was worn out. Then she worked as a servant and companion to a devout elderly woman named Mademoiselle Lecoq for twelve years, until the lady died. After nearly thirty years of quiet service, with no recognition and no savings, Jeanne reached middle age empty-handed, but with a heart shaped and ready for a mission greater than anything she had done before.

Before long, another frail old woman thrown out by her employer was taken in by Jeanne. Then a third, a fourth... The attic became too cramped. Jeanne and two young women who shared her vision pooled their money to rent a larger house on rue de la Fontaine, and later bought an old abandoned Augustinian convent.

A hard question arose: where would the money come from to feed dozens of frail, paralyzed old people, with no income at all?

She did not beg for herself; she begged for the frail old people. She asked for leftover bread, a bowl of soup, an old coat, a few spare coins. Some people hurled insults at her; one man even slapped her face. Jeanne only smiled calmly and said:

“That slap was for me; now, please be kind enough to give something for my poor old people!”

Faced with such patience, the man hung his head in shame and gave her money.

The woman who had once been a country shepherd girl, who had never had any training in management or fundraising, invented a completely new form of charity on her own: she did not wait for the rich to come and give of their own accord; she went out herself, accepting humiliation, to win coin by coin for the very people society had cast aside.

She taught the sisters who worked with her:

“Look on the poor as Jesus Himself... Give the old people the very best! Make them happy; if they are cheerful, that is a sign that our service is pleasing to God!”

In 1842, that little community formally took the name Little Sisters of the Poor. Jeanne Jugan was elected the first superior.

The congregation’s chaplain, Father Auguste Le Pailleur , a man who had given much legal help at the beginning but who was eaten up by pride and ambition, abused his authority.

In 1852, Father Le Pailleur ordered Jeanne Jugan to come and live at the motherhouse at La Tour Saint-Joseph, a convent tucked away in the small village of Saint-Pern in the Breton countryside. She was stripped of all authority, forbidden contact with the outside world, forbidden to take part in the congregation’s decisions, and not even allowed to go begging for the poor anymore.

For twenty-seven years after that, from 1852 to 1879, Jeanne Jugan lived quietly as the lowliest servant at the motherhouse.

She did menial jobs: peeling potatoes in the kitchen, mending blankets and sweeping the corridors. The hundreds of young novices who came from everywhere to join the congregation each year saw that white-haired old woman sweeping and thought she was just an ordinary elderly sister, never knowing that she was the Foundress of the congregation whose habit they were wearing.

Try to imagine that feeling: living in the midst of the very work you built with your own hands, passing every day among hundreds of people carrying on your mission, and no one knowing who you are. Not one year, not ten years, but twenty-seven long years — nearly half of a person’s adult life — erased from the story of your own life.

She smiled and taught the young novices:

“Be little, very little... Love the hidden life, and do everything in the silence of love!”

In 1890, after a rigorous investigation by the Holy See, Father Le Pailleur’s abuses of power and deceptions were brought to light. The Holy See removed him from his position and required him to withdraw to a religious house to do penance.

On October 3, 1982, Pope Saint John Paul II beatified her. On October 11, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI canonized Jeanne Jugan in Saint Peter’s Square. The Church celebrates her on August 30 each year, formerly on October 15.