Jeanne Delanoue

Jeanne Delanoue was born in 1666 in Saumur, in the province of Anjou in western France, the youngest of twelve children of a local draper. Her father died when she was still a young child, and she was raised by her mother, who kept a small shop selling religious articles and souvenirs near the pilgrimage shrine of Notre-Dame-des-Ardilliers. From an early age Jeanne helped in the shop. After her mother’s death in 1691 she inherited and continued the business. Accounts of her youth and early adulthood describe her as capable and commercially minded, even somewhat grasping, and not notably pious, despite the religious character of her trade and the proximity of the shrine.

A decisive change occurred in 1693 when a poor widow from Rennes named Françoise Souchet stayed in Jeanne’s house. Souchet, regarded as a woman of prayer, told Jeanne that God intended her to devote her life to the poor. This message, together with subsequent interior experiences, produced a conversion. Jeanne began to give away goods, to receive the destitute into her home, and to seek out the sick and abandoned in Saumur and the surrounding countryside. She gradually gave up her commercial activity and embraced a life of poverty and service, especially during times of famine and hardship in the region.

In 1704 Jeanne gathered a small community of women who shared her work. This group became the Congregation of Saint Anne of Providence of Saumur, also known as the Sisters of Saint Anne of Providence. Jeanne took the religious name Jeanne of the Cross. The sisters established houses of hospitality for orphans, the elderly, the infirm, and the homeless. They were especially active during periods of want in early eighteenth-century Anjou. Jeanne combined practical organization with a reputation for austerity and prayer. The congregation received ecclesiastical approval and continued after her death.

Jeanne Delanoue died in Saumur on 17 August 1736. She was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1947 and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982. Her liturgical feast is observed on 17 August. She is remembered as a foundress who turned from a life of trade to the care of the most abandoned in her region of France.