Jean-Martin Moye

Jean-Martin Moye was born on 27 January 1730 in the village of Cutting in the Moselle region of Lorraine, in northeastern France. He was one of a large family of devout Catholics and received a classical education at the Jesuit college of Pont-à-Mousson before entering the seminary of Saint-Simon in Metz. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Metz in 1754, he spent his first years of ministry as a curate in rural parishes. There he encountered widespread ignorance of Christian doctrine among the poor, especially among girls who had almost no access to schooling. That pastoral experience shaped the rest of his life.

In 1762 he gathered a group of young women into what became the Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Providence, founded to give free elementary and catechetical instruction to impoverished girls in country villages. The sisters lived simply, took private vows, and worked in small uncloistered communities rather than in a traditional enclosed convent. The project met both encouragement and suspicion from civil and ecclesiastical authorities unused to teaching sisters of this kind. Moye also tried to organize a comparable work for poor boys. Despite setbacks, the congregation took root in Lorraine, later establishing principal houses at Saint-Jean-de-Bassel and Portieux, and it remained under his spiritual direction for the rest of his life.

Convinced of a vocation to the foreign missions, Moye entered the seminary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and left for China in the early 1770s. He spent about a decade in the apostolic vicariate of Sichuan, traveling among scattered Christian communities, instructing catechists, and promoting the formation of native clergy. He also encouraged communities of consecrated Chinese women, often called Christian Virgins, who could catechize in settings closed to foreign priests. The mission was marked by linguistic difficulty, material hardship, and recurrent persecution. Ill health and the expulsion of missionaries forced his return to Europe in the mid-1780s.

Back in Lorraine he resumed direction of the Sisters of Divine Providence and ordinary pastoral work. The French Revolution and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy placed him in open conflict with the new regime; he refused the required oath. In 1791 he took refuge in Trier, then in the Electorate of Trier within the Holy Roman Empire, together with members of his congregation, and there he ministered to French émigré clergy and refugees. In the spring of 1793 a typhus epidemic struck the city. Moye contracted the disease while caring for the sick and died on 4 May 1793. He was beatified by Pope Pius XII on 21 November 1954. His liturgical memorial is kept on 4 May. The Sisters of Divine Providence continue his educational apostolate in several countries.