Pauline Jaricot

Pauline Marie Jaricot was born on 22 July 1799 in Lyon, France, into a prosperous family of silk merchants. Her father, Antoine Jaricot, belonged to the city's commercial elite, and the household was sincerely Catholic in the years after the Revolution and under the Napoleonic Empire. In adolescence she took part in the social life of Restoration Lyon, but around 1816 she underwent a decisive conversion. Influenced by her brother Philéas, who intended to become a missionary priest, and by the preaching she heard, she abandoned fashionable dress and amusements, made a private vow of chastity, and devoted herself to prayer, visiting the sick in hospitals, and helping young women employed in the silk workshops of Lyon.

From about 1819 she organized among working girls and other Catholics a simple system of weekly offerings of one sou, collected in groups of ten, for the support of foreign missions. This organization was formally established in 1822 as the Society for the Propagation of the Faith and soon spread throughout France and beyond; it became a major source of funding for Catholic missions in the nineteenth century and was later constituted a pontifical mission society. In 1826 she founded the Living Rosary, grouping the faithful in sets of fifteen so that the complete rosary would be recited each day. She remained a laywoman throughout her life and is recorded as having belonged to the Third Order of Saint Dominic. She also promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart and sought to combine missionary zeal with concern for the industrial poor of her own city.

In the mid-1840s Jaricot attempted to put her social ideas into practice by acquiring blast furnaces at Rustrel in the Vaucluse, intending to form a model Christian industrial community. The venture was undermined by inexperience, dishonest associates, and financial collapse; she lost her fortune and was left with heavy debts. Although the missionary associations she had created continued to expand, she was gradually excluded from their administration and spent her final years in obscurity and poverty in Lyon, at times reduced to begging. She died in Lyon on 9 January 1862.

The cause of her beatification was opened in the twentieth century. Pope John XXIII declared her virtues heroic and named her Venerable on 25 February 1963. After the recognition of a miracle attributed to her intercession—the recovery of a child in Lyon in 2012—Pope Francis authorized her beatification, which was celebrated in Lyon on 22 May 2022. She is remembered as a pioneer of organized lay support for the missions and of widespread rosary association among ordinary Catholics.