Mother Benjamin

Mother Benjamin Le Noël de Groussy (24 October 1821 – 20 May 1884) was a French Catholic sister of the Sisters of Saint Paul of Chartres. She is known for expanding the congregation's work in French Cochinchina (today Viêt Nam) and the broader region of French Indochina, establishing a network of hospitals, orphanages, schools, nurseries and institutions for people with leprosy.

Early life and religious formation

Anaïs Le Noël de Groussy was born on 24 October 1821 at Périers, in the Manche department of Normandy, France. She came from a minor noble family from the region of Coutances. Her father was the administrator of the local hospice-orphanage. Her childhood visits there are thought to have shaped her later vocation to charitable and medical work.

At the age of twenty she entered the Sisters of Saint Paul of Chartres, a congregation founded at the end of the seventeenth century by Louis Chauvet and Marie-Anne de Tilly for the education of children, the care of the sick and service to the poor. On entering religious life she received the name Benjamin, under which she later became widely known in Asia. Before being sent overseas, she served for nine years as mistress of novices at the congregation's mother house in Chartres.

Mission in East Asia

Hong Kong and Macau

Mother Benjamin was assigned to the Far East in 1858. She left France in December of that year with several companions and arrived in Hong Kong on 21 June 1859. She became head of the congregation's community there, where the Sisters of Saint Paul of Chartres had been present for about a decade.

The sisters had been invited to Hong Kong in 1848 by Bishop Théodore-Augustin Forcade to administer a garrison hospital, whose patients included many Catholic Irish soldiers. They also ran a school for Irish girls and for girls descended from Portuguese settlers from Macau. She was succeeded by Mother Marie-Virginie Richard.

In the decades that followed, the congregation of the Sisters of Saint Paul of Chartres grew into a predominantly Asian institution. Vietnam has remained one of the important regions of the congregation's presence, while European vocations declined during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.