Feast day: August 30
St. Jeanne Jugan
A French servant woman who gave her own bed to a blind, sick old widow and from that act founded the Little Sisters of the Poor, who beg door to door to care for the aged.
Jeanne Jugan was born in 1792 in Brittany, in the chaos of the French Revolution, into a poor fishing family; her father was lost at sea when she was small. She worked as a kitchen maid and a nurse, and for years lived a quiet, hidden life of work and prayer, deeply marked by care for the poor.
Her vocation found her late and by a single act. One bitter winter night, when she was about forty-seven, she came upon a blind, paralyzed old woman who had no one to care for her — and Jeanne carried her home, put her in her own bed, and took the old woman's place sleeping in the attic. Others soon followed, and her small home filled with the elderly poor.
From this beginning grew the Little Sisters of the Poor, a congregation devoted entirely to sheltering and caring for the aged poor, supported — at Jeanne's insistence — by begging door to door, so that the sisters would depend, like the poor themselves, on charity. The work spread with astonishing speed across France and beyond.
Yet in a painful turn, an ambitious priest-superior pushed Jeanne aside and effectively erased her as foundress; she spent the last twenty-seven years of her life in obscurity within her own order, unknown to the young sisters as the woman who had begun it all. Only after her death in 1879 was the truth recovered. She was canonized in 2009, the patron of the elderly poor she had served.
Pushed aside in her own community for decades, she spent her last 27 years in obscurity among the novices — who never knew she had founded the order.
Image: PSDP35 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
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