Jeanne Jugan

Jeanne Jugan, LSP (25 October 1792 – 29 August 1879), in religion Mary of the Cross, was a French Catholic religious sister who became known for the dedication of her life to the neediest of the elderly poor. Her service resulted in the establishment of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who care for the elderly throughout the world. She was canonized in 2009.

Life

Early life Jugan was born on 25 October 1792, in the port city of Cancale in Brittany, the sixth of the eight children of Joseph and Marie Jugan. She grew up during the political and religious upheavals of the French Revolution. Four years after she was born, her father, a fisherman, was lost at sea. Her mother struggled to provide for the young Jeanne and her siblings, while also providing them secretly with religious instruction amid the anti-Catholic persecutions of the day.

Jugan worked as a shepherdess while still very young, and learned to knit and spin wool. She could barely read and write. When she was 16, she took a job as the kitchen maid of the Viscountess de la Choue. The viscountess, a devout Catholic, had Jugan accompany her when she visited the sick and the poor.

At age 18, and again six years later, she declined marriage proposals from the same man. She told her mother that God had other plans, and was calling her to "a work which is not yet founded". until she left the hospital due to her own health issues. She then worked for 12 years as the servant of a fellow member of the Eudist Third Order, until the woman's death in 1835. In the course of Jugan's duties, the two women recognized a similar Catholic spirituality and began to teach catechism to the children of the town and to care for the poor and other unfortunates.

In 1837, Jugan and a 72-year-old woman (Françoise Aubert) rented part of a small cottage and were joined by Virginie Tredaniel, a 17-year-old orphan. These three women then formed a Catholic community of prayer, devoted to teaching the catechism and assisting the poor. Jugan wrote a simple Rule of Life for this new community of women, and they went door-to-door daily requesting food, clothing and money for the women in their care. This became Jugan's life work.

By 1850, over 100 women had joined the congregation. Jugan, however, was forced out of her leadership role by the Abbé Auguste Le Pailleur, the priest who had been appointed Superior General of the congregation by the local bishop. In an apparent effort to suppress her true role as foundress, he assigned her to do nothing but begging on the street until she was sent into retirement and a life of obscurity for 27 years. Her eyesight was impaired in her final years.

Expansion After communities of Little Sisters had begun to spread throughout France, the work expanded to England in 1851. From 1866 to 1871 five communities of Little Sisters were founded across the United States. By 1879, the community Jeanne founded had 2,400 Little Sisters and had spread across Europe and to North America. On 1 March that same year, Pope Leo XIII approved the Constitutions for the Little Sisters of the Poor for an initial period of seven years. At the time of her death on 29 August 1879, at the age of 86, many of the Little Sisters did not know that she was the one to have founded the congregation. Le Pailleur, however, was investigated and dismissed in 1890, and Jugan came to be acknowledged as their foundress. who said, "In the Beatitudes, Jeanne Jugan found the source of the spirit of hospitality and fraternal love, founded on unlimited trust in Providence, which illuminated her whole life."

Today, pilgrims can visit the house where she was born, the House of the Cross at Saint-Servan and the motherhouse where she lived her last 23 years at La Tour Saint Joseph in Saint-Pern.

Legacy

The Sisters at the Queen of Peace Residence in Queens Village, New York established the Jeanne Jugan Award which is presented to the staff member who best exemplifies Jugan's spirit.