Jeanne Jugan

Jeanne Jugan was born on 25 October 1792 in Cancale, a fishing port on the coast of Brittany in western France, the daughter of Joseph Jugan and Marie Horel. She was one of eight children in a poor household. When she was about four years old her father, a fisherman, was lost at sea, leaving the family in severe want. She received little formal schooling and from childhood worked to help support her mother and siblings, including as a shepherdess. In her teens she entered domestic service as a kitchen maid in the household of a viscountess, who took her to Mass and on visits to the sick and the poor of the district. Those early experiences of poverty and of practical charity shaped the rest of her life.

As a young woman she worked at a hospital in Saint-Servan and later as a companion-nurse. She became a member of the Third Order of the Eudists (the Congregation of Jesus and Mary). In the winter of 1839, while living in a small apartment in Saint-Servan, she encountered Anne Chauvin, an elderly, blind, and paralyzed woman who had been left without care. Jeanne carried the woman to her rooms, gave her her own bed, and began to look after her. She soon took in other abandoned elderly women. Neighbors and young women joined the work. The little community took the name Little Sisters of the Poor. Jeanne went out daily to collect food and alms for the residents, asking in the name of the poor rather than for herself. Houses were opened in other towns as the work grew.

Jeanne was elected superior of the community in 1842. The following year the priest who served as the sisters’ ecclesiastical director, Abbé Auguste Le Pailleur, arranged for her to be replaced and thereafter presented himself as founder of the congregation. Jeanne was reduced to the rank of a simple sister, sent on collecting tours, and later confined to the motherhouse at La Tour Saint-Joseph near Saint-Pern. There she spent her last decades in obscurity, spinning wool and quietly instructing novices, without public recognition of her role as foundress. She accepted the displacement without protest or self-justification. Only after Le Pailleur’s later removal and disgrace did historical research restore her place as foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Jeanne Jugan died on 29 August 1879 at La Tour Saint-Joseph. In religion she was known as Sister Mary of the Cross (Marie de la Croix). She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 3 October 1982 and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on 11 October 2009. Her feast is observed on 30 August. The congregation she began continues to care for the elderly poor in many countries, following the pattern of hospitality and begging that she established in nineteenth-century Brittany.