The French Revolution had broken out three years before the birth of a baby girl whose name is known today all over the world.

Jeanne Jugan was born on October 25, 1792 in Cancale (Ille-et-Vilaine), a fishing port on the north coast of Brittany, France. Her father was absent at the time, for he had sailed six months earlier for the fishing season in Newfoundland.

According to the parish registers of Cancale, she was baptized the same day in Saint Meen Church.

Less than four years later, Jeanne’s family received word that her father was lost at sea, like so many other sailors. At home, it was hard to make both ends meet. Jeanne, her brother and two sisters learned from their mother how to live in poverty with honesty and courage. They also learned to live with faith and love for God.

A servant and kitchen-maid in a manor near Cancale, Jeanne was 18 when she refused a first marriage proposal. Six years later, she asked the young sailor who renewed his request to no longer think of her. “God wants me for himself. He is keeping me for a work which is not yet known, for a work that is not yet founded,” she explained to her mother.

Jeanne probably did not realize the impact of these prophetic words. Many years were to pass before this call became clear to her.

In the meantime, she left Cancale for the nearby town of Saint Servan. A nurse at Le Rosais Hospital, a visiting nurse, then a servant, she desired only to serve God and others, especially the poor.

In this way she was faithful to the ideal of configuration to Jesus through Mary, that Saint John Eudes taught to the members of the Third Order of the Admirable Mother, an association founded in the 17^th century, which she joined around age 25.

Saint Servan, 1839

One winter’s evening, Jeanne opened her home and her heart to an elderly, half paralyzed blind woman who had suddenly found herself all alone. Jeanne gave up her bed for her.

This act committed her forever. Soon another old woman followed, then a third. In 1843, there were forty of them around Jeanne and her three companions, who had chosen her as the Superior of their small association which was slowly taking the form of a religious community.

However, it was not long before Jeanne was deprived of this responsibility. In the face of this injustice, she responded only with silence, gentleness and abandonment. Through her faith and love, she discovered in this decision God’s plan for herself and for her religious family.

She then spent all her time collecting for the poor. She had witnessed this act of charity and of sharing as a child in Cancale, when a sailor’s widow was in need. She was encouraged to do so by the Brothers of Saint John of God from the nearby hospital in Dinan.

Time of Hidden Growth, 1852-1879.

As the years passed by, Jeanne Jugan was buried more deeply in obscurity. The history of the beginning of her work was distorted. When she died on August 29, 1879, in La Tour St. Joseph, few Little Sisters knew she was the foundress.

However, her influence on the younger Little Sisters, whose lives she had shared for twenty-seven years, was decisive. During this long period, she transmitted to them the original charism and the spirit of the origins.

Little by little, the situation became clear. In 1902, the truth became evident: Jeanne Jugan, Sister Mary of the Cross, who died in oblivion a quarter of a century earlier, was not the third Little Sister, as it was believed, but the first, the foundress.

Her tomb, in the crypt of the chapel of the Motherhouse in La Tour St. Joseph (Saint Pern), attracts many pilgrims, as does her birthplace in the hamlet of Les Petites Croix in Cancale and the foundation’s house in Saint Servan.

Recognition

On July 13, 1979, the Church officially acknowledged the heroic nature of Jeanne Jugan’s virtues.

On October 3, 1982, in the presence of 6,000 pilgrims from all over the world, Pope John Paul II declared “BLESSED” JEANNE JUGAN “the most humble woman of Cancale, so poor in possessions yet so rich in faith.”