Jeanne Jugan

Jugan was born at Cancale in Brittany in 1792. Her father, a fisherman, was lost at sea when she was four. She had little formal education and worked as a shepherdess and later as a kitchen maid, and trained in knitting and spinning. She declined a proposal of marriage at eighteen, saying that she was being called to a work that had not yet been founded. She joined the Third Order of the Eudists and worked as a hospital nurse.

In the winter of 1839, at Saint-Servan in Brittany, Jugan took an elderly blind and paralysed woman, Anne Chauvin, into her own home and gave her her bed. Others joined her in the work. By 1841 she had rented a room large enough for about a dozen elderly residents, and in 1842 the group took over a former convent housing some forty people. Jugan went from door to door begging for the support of the residents, a practice that became characteristic of the congregation.

The community grew quickly and spread beyond France. About 1850 the priest Auguste Le Pailleur removed Jugan from any position of authority and had her withdraw to the novitiate, where she spent the last twenty-seven years of her life; her role as foundress was obscured within the congregation until after her death. Le Pailleur was removed from office by the Holy See in 1890. Jugan died on 29 August 1879, aged 86, in the year the congregation's constitutions were approved.

The first Little Sisters of the Poor arrived in Calcutta on 30 November 1882 to care for the elderly poor. Further houses followed at Bangalore in 1890, Secunderabad in 1903, Madras in 1934 and Bombay in 1954, and later at Coonoor, Mysore, Tuticorin, Mangalore, Erode, Guntur, Jabalpur, Goa and Sawantwadi.

Jugan was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 3 October 1982 and canonised by Pope Benedict XVI on 11 October 2009. Her feast day is 30 August.[2][3][4][5]