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Joseph Wresinski was born on 12 February 1917 in Angers, in western France, into a family living in extreme poverty. His father was a Polish immigrant and his mother was of Spanish origin; the household endured hunger, insecurity, and the social stigma attached to destitution. Those early experiences of exclusion remained central to his later understanding of poverty as a destruction of human dignity rather than merely a lack of material goods. After studies for the priesthood he was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946 for the Diocese of Soissons in northern France. He was a diocesan (secular) priest, not a member of a religious order, and lived under the Latin Church's discipline of clerical celibacy.

In the years following ordination he served in several parishes, including rural and industrial communities in the Aisne. In 1956 he was appointed chaplain to an emergency housing camp at Noisy-le-Grand, on the eastern outskirts of Paris, where families displaced by housing shortages lived in Nissen huts without adequate sanitation, work, or public recognition. Confronted with that concentration of extreme poverty, he refused both charitable paternalism and the political instrumentalization of the poor. In 1957 he founded Aide à Toute Détresse, later known as ATD Fourth World, gathering people in poverty together with allies from other social backgrounds on a basis of shared dignity and joint action. He held that the poorest themselves must be the first actors and the measure of any policy or project.

Wresinski coined and popularized the term Fourth World to name those who remain excluded even from the working class and from organized social movements, living in persistent extreme poverty across generations. He sought to make their knowledge and experience heard in the Church, in universities, and in national and international institutions. In 1987 he presented a major report on chronic poverty and social insecurity to the French Economic and Social Council. On 17 October 1987 he led a gathering at the Trocadéro Human Rights Plaza in Paris, where a commemorative stone was dedicated to the victims of poverty, hunger, violence, and ignorance; that date was later recognized by the United Nations as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Joseph Wresinski died on 14 February 1988 at Suresnes, in the Paris region. His funeral was celebrated at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and he was buried at Méry-sur-Oise, near the international center of the movement he had founded. He is remembered as a priest who identified his ministry with people in extreme poverty and as the founder of a worldwide human-rights-based movement against destitution. A cause for his beatification has been introduced in the Catholic Church, but he has not been beatified or canonized.

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