Saint Jeanne Jugan

Jeanne Jugan was born on October 25, 1792, at Les Petites-Croix, a hamlet of Cancale on the road to Saint-Coulomb, on the north coast of Brittany, and she was baptized in the old church of Saint-Méen. Her father, Joseph, a fisherman, was lost at sea about four years after her birth, and her mother raised the children alone. At sixteen she went into service as a kitchen maid with the Viscountess de la Choue. When a young sailor asked to marry her she refused, saying, as her congregation recalls, “God wants me for himself.”

She then moved to Saint-Servan, beside Saint-Malo, where she worked for six years as a nurse at the hospital of Le Rosais and afterward as a servant. At twenty-five she became an associate of the Congregation of Jesus and Mary founded by Saint John Eudes. In the winter of 1839 she took in Anne Chauvin, an elderly woman who was blind and partly paralyzed, and gave her own bed. Other old women followed, and young women came to help. The group moved to larger premises in 1841, and on the advice of the Brothers of Saint John of God Jeanne began to beg from door to door for her poor.

In 1842 the community moved into a former convent and took the name Servants of the Poor, with Jeanne as superior. She was re-elected in 1843, but on December 23 of that year the young priest named to advise the community, Abbé Auguste Le Pailleur, removed her from office and set her to collecting alms. In 1845 the Académie française awarded her the Montyon Prize. Houses opened at Rennes, Dinan and Tours, and in 1849 the sisters took the name Little Sisters of the Poor. Soon afterward Jeanne was recalled to the mother house and withdrawn from all responsibility.

From 1856 she lived at La Tour Saint-Joseph, the mother house at Saint-Pern, in Ille-et-Vilaine, as Sister Mary of the Cross. She spent her last twenty-three years there, hidden from the outside world, and died on August 29, 1879, at eighty-six. Pope Leo XIII had approved the constitutions of the Little Sisters on March 1 of that year. Only in 1902 was she publicly recognized as the foundress.

She was first buried in the cemetery of the mother house; her tomb is now in the crypt of the chapel of La Tour Saint-Joseph, where pilgrims leave their prayer intentions in a book placed on it. Her heroic virtues were recognized on July 13, 1979. Saint John Paul II beatified her on October 3, 1982, and Pope Benedict XVI canonized her in Saint Peter’s Square on October 11, 2009, saying in his homily that she had wished “to be herself a poor person among the poor.” The Little Sisters keep her feast on August 30. They landed at Brooklyn on September 13, 1868, opened thirteen homes in the United States in their first four years there, and today have twenty homes for the elderly poor in the country.

At Cancale the parish church of Saint-Méen, built between 1876 and 1898, may become a basilica in her honor. In February 2026 the town council voted to call it Sainte-Jeanne-Jugan in everyday use, and in March 2026 the bishops of France, meeting at Lourdes, approved the project, which the archbishop of Rennes is to send to Rome once the works for pilgrims are done.

She is shown as an aged sister in the habit of her congregation. In Brittany she is honored by a granite statue carved by Patrice Le Guen from a single block of about twenty-three tons, some ten feet high on a base of the same height. In May 2022 it toured Brittany; it stayed at the mother house of Saint-Pern from June 11 to July 13, and in late August 2022 it was installed in the Vallée des Saints at Carnoët, among the great statues of the saints of Brittany.

• Cancale, Les Petites-CroixThe house where she was born, where pilgrim groups hear her story from a Little Sister and Mass can be celebrated.
• Cancale, church of Saint-MéenThe parish church, called Sainte-Jeanne-Jugan in everyday use since February 2026 and proposed as a basilica in her honor; the old church where she was baptized is now a museum.
• Saint-Malo, La Mansarde at Saint-ServanAt 4 rue Jean-XXIII, near the Solidor tower and the church of Sainte-Croix, the founding house of the Little Sisters of the Poor, visited by pilgrims.
• Saint-Pern, La Tour Saint-JosephThe mother house of the Little Sisters of the Poor, where she lived from 1856 and died in 1879; her tomb is in the crypt of the chapel.