Rosalie Rendu

Jeanne-Marie Rendu, known in religion as Sister Rosalie, was born on 9 September 1786 in the village of Confort in the Ain department of eastern France, in the historic Bugey country near the Jura. She grew up in a devout Catholic household of modest rural means during the French Revolution. After her father’s death while she was still a child, her mother sent her to be educated by the Ursuline sisters at Gex. Revolutionary measures against the Church marked her early years; her family is reported to have sheltered priests who refused the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Those experiences of faith under pressure, and of practical help given in a time of upheaval, helped shape her later vocation.

In 1802, at about the age of sixteen, she entered the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris and took the name Sister Rosalie. After formation she was assigned to a community house serving the densely populated and impoverished Mouffetard district on the Left Bank, where she remained for the rest of her life—more than half a century. She became a familiar figure among the working poor, the sick, and abandoned children. Following the Vincentian tradition of seeing Christ in the poor, she organized home visits, distributed food and clothing, supported schools and workshops, and attended the dying, combining spiritual counsel with a close knowledge of the streets and tenements of her quarter.

She was especially noted in public crises. During the cholera epidemics that struck Paris in the 1830s and again in mid-century, she and her sisters nursed the sick when many others fled. In the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 she opened her house to the wounded without regard to political side. In the early 1830s she advised the young Frédéric Ozanam and his companions as they founded the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, supplying names of families in need and a model of person-to-person charity that helped form the new lay association. Civic authorities later recognized her work: in 1852 she received the Cross of the Legion of Honour.

Sister Rosalie died in Paris on 7 February 1856 after a period of declining health. Large crowds from the Mouffetard poor attended her funeral. She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. The Catholic Church beatified her on 9 November 2003, when Pope John Paul II declared her Blessed. Her memorial is kept on 7 February. She is remembered as a model of Vincentian service in the urban poverty of nineteenth-century Paris and as a spiritual influence on the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul.