Jean-Martin Moye

Jean-Martin Moye (written later in his life as Moÿe) was a French Catholic priest who served as a missionary in China and was the founder of the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence. He also organized the first expression of consecrated life among the women of China. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1954.

Early life Moye was born on 27 January 1730 in the village of Cutting, then located within the Bailiwick of Dieuze, within the autonomous Duchy of Lorriane, a part of the Holy Roman Empire, now in the French Department of Moselle. He was the sixth of the thirteen children of Jean Moye and Anne Catharine Demange, part of a long-established and prosperous farming family of the region. The fervent Catholic faith of the family can be seen in the fact that, apart from Jean-Martin, a younger brother also became a priest, as well as five of his first cousins, and later two of his nephews.

Moye had an uneventful childhood, growing up on his family's extensive holdings. He received his basic education from his older brother, Jean-Jacques, a seminarian, who taught him until his untimely death in 1744 at the age of 24. Moye completed his education at the College of Pont-à-Mousson, following which he studied philosophy at the Jesuit College of Strasbourg. In the fall of 1751 he then entered the local diocesan Seminary of Saint-Simon in Metz, She would remain in this post without disturbance throughout the upheavals of the French Revolution. Volunteers were quickly sent out to various other locations, going out as far as Freiburg im Breisgau, then in the Habsburg dominion.

Writer Out of the desire to provide the faithful of the parish with means to deepen their spiritual lives, Moye began to publish some tracts, in collaboration with a younger colleague, the Abbé Louis Jobal de Pagny (1737–1766). The first, in 1762, was a pamphlet entitled Du soin extrème qu'on doit avoir du Baptême des enfants. It treated the baptism of newborn infants, especially stillborn babies. It was a development of Abrégé de l’Embryologie sacrée, a work by a Sicilian moral theologian, Francesco Cangiamiglia, which had just been published in Paris, having originally been published in Sicily in 1745 with ecclesiastical approval. The next year, he began evangelizing in Guizhou with a Sichuanese missionary, Benoît Sen. In 1782 he founded the "Christian Virgins", religious women following the rules of the Congregation of Providence at home, devoting themselves to the care of the sick and to the Christian instruction of Chinese women and children in their own homes.

Death Exhausted and ill, Moye returned to France in 1784. He resumed the direction of the Sisters of Divine Providence and evangelized Lorraine and Alsace by preaching missions. The French Revolution of 1791 drove him into exile, and with his Sisters he retired to Trier. After the capture of the city by the French troops, typhoid fever broke out and, helped by his Sisters, he devoted himself to hospital work. He contracted the disease and died in 1793.

Moye was buried in the cemetery of the cathedral. The cemetery, however, was closed in 1808 and paved over to form the Konstantinsplatz of the city. His grave has never been identified.