Nine “pilgrims” are setting out from the Sacred Heart Home in Oregon Oct. 6, heading for Rome to attend the canonization ceremony of Blessed Jeanne Jugan, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The pilgrims include Sr. Rose Marie Kietter, Barbara Berry, John Beutler, Rose Bollin, Helen Carroll, Janet Eskra, Anne Gothier, Janet Leach and Tina Trujillo.

While in Rome, they will be staying with other pilgrims who have traveled from all 203 Little Sister Homes around the world. Each Home is sending a delegation of pilgrims who will be attending the ceremony at St. Peter's Basilica Sunday, Oct. 11. 

At the ceremony, the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI will be naming the religious order a Saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope is expected to name St. Jeanne Jugan the patron saint of the elderly due to her and the Little Sisters’ care of the elderly poor as their mission.

Besides attending the canonization ceremony, the pilgrims will be celebrating a special Mass in Rome and will have a private audience with the Pope. They will also be doing some sight seeing in Rome and other areas of Italy.

The delegation will return Oct. 15.

Who is Sr. Jeanne Jugan? Born in Cancale, in Ille-et-Vilaine, France, in the village of Petites Croix, on Oct. 25, 1792, Jeanne was baptized on the same day in the Church of Saint-Méen, during the upheaval of the French Revolution.

Her father, a sailor like most men from that area, was away in Newfoundland for the fishing season. Four years later, he was lost at sea. Her mother remained alone to raise her four children (four others died as infants). At the age of 16, Jeanne began helping her family by working as a kitchen maid in a manor near Cancale.

She stayed there until the age of 25, and then left home for Saint Servan where she worked as a nurse’s aide at Le Rosais Hospital. When a young sailor asked her to marry him, she was said to have replied, “God wants me for himself. He is keeping me for a work which is not yet founded.”

Jeanne desired only to serve God and the poor – especially the weakest and the most destitute – 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 that she joined around the age of 25.

One winter’s evening in 1839, she opened her door and her heart to a blind, semi-paralyzed elderly woman who had suddenly found herself alone. Jeanne gave up her own bed - an act which is said to have committed her forever. A second elderly woman followed, then a third. In 1843, they numbered 40 around Jeanne and her three young companions. These latter had chosen her as superior of their small association which would gradually develop into a true religious life.

However, Jeanne Jugan would soon be ousted from this responsibility and reduced to the simple activity of the collecting, a hard task which she herself had begun. She had been encouraged in this act of charity and sharing by the Brothers of Saint John of God. Jeanne replied to injustice with silence, gentleness and abandonment.

As the years passed by, Jeanne Jugan became more and more shrouded in obscurity. The beginnings of her work were falsified. She was kept in the background for 27 years (1852 to 1879), four at the Home in Rennes, and the last 23 years of her long life at La Tour Saint Joseph, the Motherhouse of the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Poor since 1856.

At the time of her death, on Aug. 29, 1879, she was 86. Few Little Sisters knew that she was the foundress, but her influence on the young postulants and novices whose life she shared during those 27 proved to be decisive. During this prolonged contact, the initial charism was passed on, the spirit of the beginnings was transmitted.

In 1902, the truth began to emerge about Jeanne Jugan, Sister Mary of the Cross, who died in oblivion a quarter of a century earlier. She was not the third Little Sister, as everyone had been led to believe, but the first, the Foundress.

*Biography of Jeanne Jugan provided by the Sacred Heart Home of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

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