Saint Jeanne Jugan

She was born at Cancale, on the coast of Brittany, on October 25, 1792, in the middle of the French Revolution. ²³ The Holy See biography says she was the sixth of eight children, four of whom died in infancy. ² Her father, a fisherman, was lost at sea when she was four by the Holy See's account, at three and a half by Franciscan Media's. ²³

The Little Sisters, her own congregation, say that people who openly practiced their faith in those years were imprisoned or killed, and that she was taught it secretly, at great risk, by her mother and a group of laywomen. ⁴ The Holy See biography says the politics of the time and the family's finances kept her out of school; ladies of the Third Order of Saint John Eudes taught her to read and write. ² As a girl she tended the herd on the cliffs above the bay and prayed the Rosary while she did it. ²

At 15, or 15 or 16 as Franciscan Media has it, she went to work as a kitchen maid for a wealthy family near Cancale. ²³ With her employer, the Holy See biography says, she went to help the needy. ²

When a young man asked to marry her, she turned him down. The Little Sisters give her words to her mother as "God wants me for himself. He is keeping me for a work which is not yet founded." ⁴ The Holy See biography adds that she divided her clothes into two piles and left the prettier one to her sisters. ²

She went to Saint-Servan and worked for six years as an assistant nurse, and she joined the Third Order of Saint John Eudes. ²³ Franciscan Media names the hospital as Le Rosais. ³ Ill health eventually forced her to leave, and she was taken in by a friend from the Third Order, Miss Lecoq, whom she served until Miss Lecoq died in 1835. ² Franciscan Media says the two of them prayed, visited the poor and taught catechism to children. ³

By 1839 she was 47 and sharing an apartment with two others: Fanchon, who was 71, and Virginie Trédaniel, a 17-year-old orphan. ² At the time, 4,000 of Saint-Servan's 10,000 people were reduced to begging. ²

One winter evening in 1839 she came across a blind old woman with no one to look after her, and gave her her own bed. ² The Little Sisters describe her as blind and paralyzed, and say Jeanne carried her up to the apartment and slept in the attic from then on. ⁴ In a 2025 column for the congregation, Sister Constance Veit gives the woman's name as Anne. ⁵

More came. Young women came to help, and the Little Sisters say they cared for the old women as if they were their own grandmothers and gave them the best places while they slept on the attic floor. ⁴ In 1841 she rented a large room for twelve elderly people, and in 1842, with no money, she bought a dilapidated convent that soon housed forty. ² The group called itself the Servants of the Poor and elected her superior; in 1844 it became the Sisters of the Poor, and in 1849 the name Little Sisters of the Poor was definitively adopted. ⁴

Encouraged by a brother of Saint John of God, she went begging in the streets for her old people, and the Holy See biography says she founded the work on abandonment to Providence. ² "Give us the house," she often said. "If God fills it, God will not abandon it." ⁴ In 1845 she won the Montyon Prize, given each year "to a poor French man or woman for outstandingly meritorious activity." ² Houses followed at Rennes and Dinan in 1846, Tours in 1847 and Angers in 1850; by 1853, Franciscan Media says, there were 500 members and a house as far away as England. ²³

The sources tell what happened next in different tones. The Holy See biography says she was re-elected superior in 1843 and that Father Le Pailleur, "contrary to all expectations and solely on his own authority," named Marie Jamet, who was 21, in her place. ² Franciscan Media says he prevented her reelection. ³ The Little Sisters, writing about their own founder, say she was "mysteriously cast aside by an ambitious priest who had taken over the direction of the young community," replaced as superior and sent out begging for the poor. ⁴

In 1852 the Bishop of Rennes officially recognized the congregation and appointed Le Pailleur superior general. ² His first act, the Holy See biography says, was to call her back to the motherhouse for good, "for a retirement that was to last 27 long years." ² Franciscan Media puts it as an assignment to duties within the congregation, under a priest who would not allow her to be recognized as its founder. ³ The young sisters, multiplying as the work spread, did not know who she was. ²⁴

The Holy See biography says she saw God's will in Le Pailleur's action and kept supporting the work, encouraging the younger sisters by her example. ² She took the religious name Sister Mary of the Cross. ⁴ "Do not call me Jeanne Jugan," the Little Sisters record her saying. "All that is left of her is Sister Mary of the Cross, unworthy though she is of that lovely name." ⁴ Benedict XVI said she lived "peacefully accepting obscurity and self-emptying until her death." ¹

She died at the motherhouse on August 29, 1879, at 86. ²⁴ Franciscan Media's header gives the same date, though its prose says August 30. ³ By then, the Holy See biography says, there were 2,400 Little Sisters in 177 homes on three continents; Franciscan Media gives the same 2,400 for the year Leo XIII gave final approval to the constitutions, which was also 1879. ²³ Her last words, as the Little Sisters keep them, were to Mary: "You know that I love you and I long to see You." ⁴

In 1890 the Holy See removed Le Pailleur from office. ³ In the 1890s, the Little Sisters say, their mother general had the motherhouse chaplain search the archives to discover "the truth" about her, and a history published in 1902 reinstated her as foundress. ⁴ Her cause was introduced in Rome in 1970, and John Paul II declared her Venerable in 1979. ³⁴ He beatified her on October 3, 1982, after the cure of a resident of the congregation's home in Toulon was recognized as a miracle. ²⁴ A second cure, of Dr. Edward Gatz of Omaha, Nebraska, was approved in 2008, and Benedict XVI canonized her on October 11, 2009, on the same day as Damien of Molokai. ¹⁴

None of the sources consulted for this profile names a patronage for Saint Jeanne Jugan, so this page does not claim one. ¹²³⁴ What Benedict XVI said at her canonization was a hope: "May St Jeanne Jugan be for elderly people a living source of hope and for those who generously commit themselves to serving them, a powerful incentive to pursue and develop her work!" ¹ That is a prayer from a homily rather than a formal patronage, and it is reported here as what it is.

Franciscan Media keeps Saint Jeanne Jugan as its Saint of the Day on August 30. ³ Her own congregation marks the feast in August: Sister Constance Veit, writing for the Little Sisters of the Poor in the United States at the end of August 2025, spoke of "this month when we celebrate the feast day of our foundress." ⁵

She died on August 29, 1879. ²⁴ No source consulted here gives August 29 as a feast, so this page gives it only as the day she died.

The story starts with a bed. She had one, a blind old woman in the cold had none, and she gave hers up and slept in the attic. ²⁴ The begging, the houses and the thousands of sisters all grew out of that. ²³

Then the thing she founded was taken from her, by a priest and within four years, and she spent nearly three decades in the house of a congregation that did not know her as its founder. ²³⁴ The sources do not turn that into a reward. The Holy See biography says she saw God's will in it and went on encouraging the younger sisters; Benedict XVI speaks of her "peacefully accepting obscurity." ¹² Her name was restored more than twenty years after she died. ⁴

Her sayings, as her sisters kept them, are mostly about ordinary work done for the old. "My little ones, we should always be cheerful, for our old people do not like long faces," she told them. ⁴ Franciscan Media quotes another: "With the eye of faith, we must see Jesus in our old people." ³

Benedict XVI said her charism is "ever timely while so many elderly people are suffering from numerous forms of poverty and solitude and are sometimes also abandoned by their families." ¹ He was describing a need, and a congregation still at work on it. ¹