Saint Joan Antida Thouret

She was born on November 27, 1765, and baptized the same day, taking the name of her godmother. ³ Her congregation places her birth at Sancey, a village of the Franche-Comté, and Avvenire at Sancey-le-Long; Antonio Galuzzi says only that she was born near Besançon, and santiebeati's heading gives Besançon itself. ²³ The family worked the land and was poor. ² The congregation says her parents had three sons before her; Mariella Lentini, that there were fifteen in the household and she was the eldest of the daughters. ²³

Her mother died when she was sixteen. ²³ Jeanne-Antide took her place, running a large household, and the congregation notes that an aunt did not agree with her father's decision to hand her the charge. ³ Her father wanted a suitable marriage for her, and she refused it. ²³ Galuzzi says it took repeated prayers and tears to overcome his opposition before she could leave. ²

In 1787, at twenty-two, she joined the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul and learned to serve the sick poor, first at Langres and then in Paris. ³ Galuzzi says she fell ill as a novice and, fearing she would be sent home, prayed to the Virgin and recovered. ² The congregation's account of those years lists illness, grief at her father's death and disorder inside the convents, and says that none of it made her stray from what she had set out to do. ³ The Revolution closed the convents, and in 1793 she was forced back to her village. ³

At Sancey, the congregation writes, she found children with no school, sick people with no doctor, Christians with no priests and priests in hiding, and she helped all of them. ³ Then she followed Father Receveur and his community of Solitaries into Switzerland and on into Germany, a company of fugitives threatened by the Imperial and the Austrian armies alike. ²³ At Neustadt, in Bavaria, she watched her younger sister and many others die. ³

In 1797 she left the Solitaries at Wiesent, near Regensburg, and set out alone, the congregation says, "with no money, without papers, not knowing German." ³ She reached Einsiedeln and then Landeron, near the French border, and there she was given the mission of going back to Besançon to help rebuild the diocese after the Revolution. ³ The Terror flared up again, and she had to hide for nearly a year at La Grange, in a tiny room a friend lent her at the risk of her own life. ³

The congregation dates her first school in Besançon to April 11, 1799; Galuzzi has her open a school there in 1797 and a second, with a pharmacy, in 1799, which became the first nucleus of the Sisters of Charity. ²³ She opened a soup kitchen for the poor, and Lentini says people called her community the "sisters of the broth"; she also took on the prison of Bellevaux, where she found the mentally ill, orphans and prostitutes held together, and set the prisoners to paid work. ²

Her foundation was recognized by the prefects and then by Napoleon. ³ In 1810 the sisters were called to the Kingdom of Naples by Madame Letizia, Napoleon's mother, and Lentini adds that Joachim Murat, the emperor's brother-in-law and king of Naples, asked for houses there. ²³ In Naples she took charge of the Hospital of the Incurables. ²

There were troubles from the beginning. An Abbé Bacoffe, the congregation says, claimed the role of superior, since in the thinking of the time a community of women could not be led by a woman. ³

In Italy she asked for papal approval of the constitutions she had written, and in 1819 the Church approved her rule of life. ³ The congregation calls it one of the first to present an apostolic religious life for women. ³ The changes Rome required were small, but the new archbishop of Besançon, Gabriel Courtois de Pressigny, refused them entirely and forbade the sisters of his diocese to receive their foundress. ³ Galuzzi puts the dispute in terms of jurisdiction: the communities around Besançon would not accept the papal arrangement that placed each house under the bishop of its own territory. ²

She went to Paris to try for a reconciliation and failed. ³ Galuzzi says she waited two years there, went back and was rejected again, and then stepped aside to let God's will be done. ² She returned to Naples by way of Savoy and lived her last years there "painfully," in the congregation's word, still loving the communities that had broken away. ³

She died at Naples on August 24, 1826; Avvenire gives the cause as a cerebral hemorrhage, and Galuzzi says she died smiling and blessing the sisters around her. ¹²³ The two branches of her institute were reunited in 1954. ³

John Paul II, speaking to her sisters in 1995, called "God alone!" the motto she left them "in a crucial hour for the history of the Church in France and in Europe"; the address is translated here from the Italian. ⁴ The congregation names it the first pole of her spirituality and quotes a letter of February 23, 1813: "when God calls and is listened to, He gives all that is necessary." ³

The second, by the same account, was the Church. ³ She called herself a daughter of the Church and asked her sisters to be the same, and the congregation says her loyalty to the pope earned her the name Filia Petri, against the Gallican spirit of the bishops who opposed her. ³ The third was the poor: she was, the congregation says, a true daughter of Saint Vincent, whom she regarded as the father and model of her institute. ³

Francis, addressing the congregation's general chapter in 2021, told them in translation that in care for the poor and in listening to the poor "you are teachers," not with words but with deeds. ⁵ He closed by asking the Virgin and Saint Joan Antida to protect them. ⁵

No source used for this page names a patronage for Saint Joan Antida Thouret, and none is claimed here. ¹²³ She is honored as the foundress of the Sisters of Charity who bear her name, whose sisters are now present throughout the world. ²⁵

Saint Joan Antida Thouret's feast is August 24, the day of her death. ¹² The Roman Martyrology lists her that day at Naples, as the virgin who gathered companions at Besançon into the new Congregation of the Sisters of Charity and ended her days "worn out by great tribulations," in a translation of the Italian bishops' printing. ¹ Galuzzi adds that her congregation celebrates her on May 23. ²

Much of her life was spent being sent away: from her convent by the Revolution, from the Solitaries by her own choice, and finally from her own communities by her archbishop. ³ Each time she went where she had not chosen, and began again. ³

The last refusal was not repaired in her lifetime. ³ She went to Paris, failed, and went back to Naples, and the branches of her institute were not reunited until 1954, more than a century after she died. ²³

Her motto was two words, God alone, and John Paul II read in it the whole demand of charity, since God is love. ⁴ The congregation keeps beside it her sentence that God, when he calls and is heard, gives all that is needed. ³

What she gave was practical: schools, broth, a prison set to work, a hospital in Naples. ²³ Francis told her sisters they were teachers in that, by deeds rather than words. ⁵