Saint Jeanne Delanoue

She was born at Saumur on June 18, 1666, the youngest of twelve children. ²³⁴ Her parents owned a business near the shrine of Notre-Dame-des-Ardilliers, which Fabio Arduino describes as a modest haberdashery. ²⁴ She was six when her father died, and she helped her mother run the shop to keep the family. ²⁴

The Holy See's biography describes her as "skillful, energetic, and indefatigable, even to the point of keeping the store open on Sundays and holy days." ² John Paul II, in a passage translated here from the French, said she was known above all as "a prudent and self-interested tradeswoman." ³ Mariella Lentini puts it more bluntly: her heart was hardened, she thought only of the shop and its takings, and she cared nothing for those less fortunate. ⁴

Lentini also describes the Saumur of those years: in 1693 hard winters and failed harvests reduced a quarter of the town to hunger, and those who had lost everything took shelter in stables dug into the hillsides. ⁴ John Paul II spoke of the same late seventeenth century, with its famines, bad harvests and harsh winters. ³

At twenty-seven, shortly after her mother's death, an elderly woman who was a faithful pilgrim to the shrine urged her to give herself to the many poor of the neighborhood. ² The homily names her as Françoise Souchet, "a fervent and poor pilgrim" in translation, and places the change in the season of Pentecost, in prayer at the shrine. ³ Lentini adds that Jeanne prayed, saw a vision of the Virgin showing her a new mission, and took the name Jeanne of the Cross. ⁴ Lentini also has both parents dead by the time she ran the shop, where the Holy See has her mother die only shortly before. ²⁴

John Paul II described what happened in her, in translation: she became "a very great prodigal in charity" when the Holy Spirit, putting out "the fire of her avarice," made her understand that her ardent faith also required "the fire of this charity." ³ He added that she kept a mystical familiarity with the Virgin, and that the example of the young Father Grignion de Montfort could only have encouraged her. ³

The poor took more of her time each day than her customers did, until, the Holy See says, "finally they became her full-time occupation." ² In 1700 she took a child into her house, and soon after the sick, the old and the destitute. ²⁴

The homily lists what she did, and it follows the works of mercy almost word for word. ³ She visited those who lived like animals in the stables cut into the hillside, brought them food and clothes, washed their clothes and gave them her own when she had to, tried to warm their shelters, gave freely to passersby and began to take them into her own lodging. ³ Then she fitted out three houses lent to her, which she called "Providences," for orphan children, girls left to themselves, women in distress, the old and every kind of destitute person. ³

She did not like to distinguish between the deserving poor and the rest, John Paul II said; she helped them all, but she also wanted them to share the work, and to teach a trade to the children and the girls. ³ She begged herself at times, often ate worse than the poor did, fasted and slept little. ³

She was criticized for it. The well-to-do of the town, and even priests, the homily says, attacked her "excessive" austerities and her "disorderly" charities. ³ Nothing stopped her, not even the collapse of her first house of welcome, and the pope quoted her words, in translation: "I want to live and die with my dear brothers the Poor." ³

In 1704 some young women offered to help her, willing to wear a religious habit if she wished. ² "It was thus that the congregation of Sainte-Anne de la Providence was born," the Holy See writes, and its constitutions were approved under that name in 1709. ² She wanted her sisters to live in the same house as the poor, eat as they ate, be treated as they were when sick, and wear a plain gray habit; they were to greet the poor with respect and serve them first. ³

In 1715 her persistence, and the women working with her, brought about the foundation of Saumur's first home for the poor, which, the Holy See notes, Louis XIV had called for in 1672. ² Her work soon spread beyond Saumur and its diocese, and she had forty helpers under her direction. ² John Paul II said that Saumur still had no hospice, and that she wanted a great service of charity for the destitute and the abandoned sick, with visits to them and little schools for their children. ³ Avvenire and Arduino date the house for the poor at Saumur to 1715 as well. ⁴

She died at Saumur on August 17, 1736, leaving a dozen communities, as well as homes for the poor and schools. ¹² "The saint is dead," people said in the town. ² Everyone had seen her zeal, the Holy See says, but "only her closest friends knew about her mortification, her life of prayer and of union with God." ²

John Paul II went further. ³ It did not seem, he said in translation, that her temperament drew her to the poor out of sentiment or pity; the Holy Spirit showed her Christ in them, the Christ Child in their children, Christ the friend of the poor, and Christ humiliated and crucified. ³ She turned to God "with the boldness of a child," expecting everything from his Providence, and her devotion to Mary, to the Trinity and to the Eucharist was, he said, "far removed from the prevailing Jansenism." ³ He closed with a warning for the Church of his own day: there would be no true reform without an authentic current of mysticism. ³

Pius XII beatified her on November 5, 1947, and John Paul II canonized her on October 31, 1982, together with Marguerite Bourgeoys. ²³⁴ The Holy See counted about four hundred Sisters of Jeanne Delanoue at the time, in France, Madagascar, and Sumatra, where they had begun in 1979. ²

No source used for this page names a patronage for Saint Jeanne Delanoue, and none is claimed here. ¹²³ John Paul II proposed her to the whole Church, and not only to Saumur and the diocese of Angers. ³

Saint Jeanne Delanoue's feast is August 17, the day of her death. ¹⁴ The Roman Martyrology lists her that day at Saumur, near Angers, as the virgin who, firmly trusting in the help of divine Providence, first took orphans, old women, the sick and prostitutes into her home, and then founded with some companions the Institute of the Sisters of Saint Anne of Providence. ¹

Her conversion was a conversion from money. ³ The sources do not soften what she was before it: a capable trader who kept her shop open on Sundays and, in the pope's word, was self-interested. ²³

What she did afterward was literal. ³ She fed, clothed, sheltered and visited, and she gave away what she had been keeping. ³

She was criticized by respectable people and by priests, and her first house fell down. ³ She went on, and said she wanted to live and die with the poor. ³

John Paul II located the source of it in her prayer, which only her friends saw, and in a trust in Providence so complete that she gave the name to her houses. ²³