Blessed Pauline Jaricot

Pauline Jaricot was born in Lyon on July 22, 1799, into a prosperous family of silk manufacturers. In 1816 a Lenten sermon on vanity moved her to give up the fashionable life of her circle and to care for the sick and poor of the city, and on Christmas Day of that year, at seventeen, she made a vow of perpetual virginity. Among the servant girls of Lyon she founded a union of prayer whose members were called the Réparatrices du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus-Christ.

She asked the women who worked in her family’s silk mill to pray for the missions and to give one sou a week, and she organized the givers in circles of ten. From this network grew the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in Lyon in 1822; that same year its first gifts reached the diocese of Louisiana. Pope Pius XI declared the Society pontifical on May 3, 1922, and it is today one of the Pontifical Mission Societies. In 1826 she founded the Living Rosary, in which groups of fifteen each prayed one decade a day. Gregory XVI approved it in 1832, and at her death it counted more than 150,000 groups.

In 1832 she bought the Maison Breda, on the slope of Fourvière, which has since borne the name of Lorette. From there she and her companions watched the revolts of the Lyon silk workers, and in its grounds she had a chapel built in honor of Saint Philomena. On August 10, 1835, she was cured at the shrine of Saint Philomena at Mugnano, in Italy. She was a friend of Saint John Mary Vianney, who gave her a cross now kept in her room at Lorette.

Around 1845 she bought an ironworks with blast furnaces, meant to be a model of Christian social reform with just conditions for the workers. The managers she trusted squandered the money of the investors, the venture ended in bankruptcy, and she spent her last years in poverty. She died in Lyon on January 9, 1862.

Further reading: Lyon: A Pilgrim’s Guide to Fourvière and the Martyrs of 177.

She was buried in the family vault at the cemetery of Loyasse. Since 1935 her remains have rested in the church of Saint-Nizier, in the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, where an urn receives written accounts of graces, and since 1889 her heart has been kept in the church of Saint-Polycarpe, on the Croix-Rousse. Saint John XXIII declared her Venerable in 1963. On May 26, 2020, Pope Francis recognized as a miracle the cure of Mayline Tran, a girl of three who had fallen into a coma after choking in 2012. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle beatified Pauline at the Eurexpo exhibition center in Lyon on May 22, 2022, before nearly 12,000 people, and a relic of her heart was carried in procession. In his message for the beatification Mass, Pope Francis recalled that she had given her whole life to the mission, to the service of the poor and to prayer.

Her portraits show her as a young woman of Lyon, often wearing a coral necklace; the necklace is kept with her other belongings in her room at Lorette. The house, owned by the Pontifical Mission Societies and restored in the early 2000s, also keeps the chapel of Saint Philomena that she had built, with terraces looking over Lyon toward the Alps, and holds exhibitions through the year.

• Lyon, Maison de LoretteHer house on the Montée Saint-Barthélemy below Fourvière, with her room and the chapel of Saint Philomena; open from February 2 to December 23 every day except Tuesday and some holidays (afternoons only on Sundays); entry free.
• Lyon, Church of Saint-NizierHer tomb, in the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, where her remains have rested since 1935.
• Lyon, Church of Saint-PolycarpeThe church on the Croix-Rousse where her heart has been kept since 1889, in the side chapel of Saint Francis Xavier; check with the parish that the church is open before visiting.

On our ways: Lyon.

• Via CaritatisThe Way of Charity, seven daysDay VI, Lyon
• Via SanctorumThe Way of the Saints, nine daysDay VII, Ars to Lyon