At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. [Matthew 18:1-5, NRSV]
(L) Sr Jeanne on her begging round (m); Sisters caring for elderly poor (l & r).; (R) “Never forget that the poor is our Lord.”
In Search of the Spirit of a Saint [2] (Part I)
St Jeanne Jugan (Mary of the Cross)
On October 11, 2009, the Blessed Jeanne Jugan, the foundress and first Little Sister of the Poor, was canonized in a Vatican celebration together with four others, including Peter Damian the leper priest of whom we wrote in our last post. Her chosen ministry was to care for the elderly poor. The latest saint from France, Jeanne Jugan was beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 3, 1982 and venerated as Marie de la Croix (Mary of the Cross).
Born in 1792, in Cancale of Brittany, France, she was sixth of eight children of Joseph and Marie Jugan. Her father died when she was four years old and her mother raised this large family alone. Growing up in hard times in a small town in revolutionary France, being openly faithful would be subject to ridicule, but her mother kept and nurtured their faith. She learned to do chores very early in childhood. From age sixteen, she spent nine years working as a kitchen maid of the Viscountess de la Choue. A devout Christian, the viscountess often brought Jeanne along on her visits to the sick and the poor. Next, she worked for six years in a physically demanding job in the town hospital of Saint-Servan.
St Jugan’s story took a definitive turn in 1837 when she and a 72-year old woman (Françoise Aubert) rented part of a small cottage and were joined by Virginie Tredaniel, a 17-year old orphan. They formed a community of prayer, devoted to teaching the catechism and assisting the poor. Two years later, she took in Anne Chauvin, a blind old widow with no one to look after her. To begin with, Jeanne had to physically carry Anne up the narrow stairs to her second floor apartment. She then moved into the loft, so that Anne could have her bed. Before long she took in another old woman, and her mission of caring for the elderly poor took a point of no return. Apart from caring for these elderly women, Jeanne and her two companions had to work to support themselves and them. That often entailed staying up late at night mending and washing clothes and getting up early each morning to attend to the women under their care.
Soon, other young women came to help her in this mission of assisting lonely elderly women, and from this humble beginning a religious community called “The Little Sisters of the Poor” was born. Jeanne wrote a simple rule for this new community of women, and they daily went door-to-door requesting food, clothing and money for the women in their care. This was Jeanne’s mission, her defining life work. By the time of her death, there were 2400 Little Sisters of the Poor in 10 different countries.
From the first time we went to the house of the Little Sisters of the Poor at Jalan Cheras, Kuala Lumpur, to conduct a retreat for the Archdiocesan Pastoral Institute, the spirit of the Sisters had already left a strong impression on us. They had at once gotten us interested in their work and their founder, and the books they gave us marked the beginning of our reading on the future saint and the Little Sisters’ homes for the needy elderly. Their Kuala Lumpur home for the elderly poor is immaculately clean. Working alongside their employees in tending to their residents, they are shining examples to them. Enlisting the voluntary services of parishioners of goodwill in their home, they promote the works of charity amongst the laity. St Jugan and her Sisters are truly a great gift to the church.
There are many elements in the spirituality of St Jugan that are very challenging indeed. We select for reflection a few of those elements which we feel demand attention in this modern world.
1. Becoming little amongst the little
The founding charism of the Little Sisters of the Poor is “Be little, make yourselves very little” – an advice St Jugan repeatedly gave the novices. This spirituality plays out concretely in two dimensions: be little in order to be close to the most humble, and be close to make them happy. “The poor,” she said, “are sensitive to attentions.” Making the poor happy meant, for St Jugan, according them the quality of gaze and attention that make them conscious of their dignity and greatness as sons and daughters of God. That is the very vocation of the Sisters.
Their founder had the deep insight that in order to be close to the humblest and least, the Sisters had to become very little themselves. No close links could ever be established if they kept their distance or placed themselves above others. This insight is inspired by the kenotic spirit of the most high Son of God, who would not even cling to His divine status but emptied Himself to become a humble human creature in order to be close to all (Phil 2:6-11).
One is not naturally little, of course. It takes Christian discipline to become so. St Jugan’s life story bespeaks the amount of time and effort and much renunciation to build up and deepen this spirituality. Above all, St Jugan teaches that one must want it, pursue it, and pray for it as a grace. “Be little, very little, before God” is the constant message of their foundress the Little Sisters share with people they meet and bless.
2. Becoming a poor person amongst the poor
From the outset, in order to do her ministry as perfectly as possible, St Jugan shed all material possessions to become “a poor person among the poor” until her death in 1879, aged 86.
To support the growth in her new found Order, Sr. Jeanne devoted herself to begging. The future saint, with a basket over her arm, was a well-known sight all over town. She knew that it would cost her dearly to beg, but she would do it anyway because she was begging for others.
Once, she persuaded a rich but notoriously miserly man to donate a sizable gift. When she called again the next day, he was very angry, but she simply smiled and said, “Sir, my poor were hungry yesterday, they are hungry again today, and tomorrow they will be hungry too.” The man became a regular benefactor of Sr. Jeanne’s works. On another occasion, when she was slapped by a rich man, she simply said, “Thank you! That slap was for me. Now please give me something for my poor.” On a third occasion, instead of allowing her into the courtyard out of respect for her, so that she did not have to mix with the professional beggars, an employee at the town’s Charity Office just barked at her: “Get into line, like the others.” That experience taught her that she was not begging for the poor; she was one of the poor. She had to see herself as a poor woman, and took her place in the queue, “like the others”. While making her rounds to beg for the poor, she had to be the little sister of the poor and with the poor.
St Jugan and her Sisters teach us that the struggle for justice may take many forms and involve many spiritualities. In choosing to serve the elderly poor, the Sisters take on their suffering vicariously. They bear the same humiliation, marginalization, silencing and injustice suffered by the elderly poor, for they understand that those they serve suffer them on a daily basis. In this way, they become a reminder to all of us that those who serve the poor cannot avoid becoming poor; those who serve the marginalized cannot but become marginalized.
It took deep spirituality to live that. But St Jugan did it, and in the process she cultivated such a powerful base of inner abandonment that no one could rob her of her dignity and nothing could shake her from her inner peace and serenity. Settling deep into her spiritual conviction is this life-message: “It is so beautiful to be poor, to have nothing, to avail all from God.” This would later stand her in good stead against a power-grabbing cleric who robbed her of her founding status and banished her to oblivion. It would provide the spiritual strength during a most difficult period of her hidden life that others would never experience, let alone to withstand. But it would enable her to later emerge in full recognition of the Church as a truly authentic witness.
3. Giving respect to the elderly poor
St Jugan had a deep and prophetic spiritual intuition of the needs and deep desires of the elderly: their desire to be respected, esteemed and loved. They may be old, but they have their dignity, and we must not allow a cruel and cold society to rob that from them.
St Jugan understood early how the poor elderly felt. She knew well the deep pain of the poor, which is that no one needed their friendship. This loneliness is the most punishing of all human sufferings. It is not enough to give a poor person shelter, food and health care. Above all these, they need to feel loved and given consideration. A Little Sisters’ home for the elderly poor maintains that quality of relationship, without which any home can become another sad place, one that kills the spirit before the body.
A Little Sister caring for a dying resident
St Jugan’s profound spirituality in this area shines through in her advice: “Never forget that the poor is our Lord.” Truly, as many have observed, St Jugan was Mother Teresa before Mother Teresa. She preceded the world-renown Mother Teresa of Calcutta in her piercing spiritual insight that by serving the poor of the world, we are serving the Lord. From this, George Weigel derives a valuable lesson: “The Little Sisters of the Poor and their patients are living reminders that there are no disposable human beings; that everyone is a someone for whom the Son of God entered the world, suffered, and died; and that we read others out of the human family at our moral and political peril.”
In his conversation with us, a medical doctor in Penang lamented over the lack of “good” doctors these days. Society in general and the medical profession in particular, he said, make a grave mistake in assuming that good grades mean good doctors. Nothing is further from the truth in all professional fields. To the young housemen under his charge, he has but one advice: “Be a good doctor; talk nicely to your patients.”And, referring to St Jugan’s canonization, Pope Benedict not only said that the event “will show once again how living faith is prodigious in good works,” but stressed that “sanctity is a healing balm for the wounds of humankind.”
4. Living in obscurity
By far the most difficult aspect of St Jugan’s spirituality is reflected in her ability to live silently, in total obscurity, for the last 27 years of her life, consigned to the mother house by an evil and ambitious priest who robbed her of her founding status and denied her any active participation in the life and mission of the Little Sisters. This part of the life story of St Jugan is as excruciating and shocking to read as any biography of a saint can ever get. It was, on the one hand, a sordid story of clerical abuse and oppression on women religious and, on the other hand, a glorious narrative of the incredible spiritual depth of the founder of a religious congregation.
Sr. Jeanne Jugan was first elected superior of the small congregation in 1841. Soon their work grew and their name spread. By December 1843, the Sisters were providing care for some 40 people and for the second time they re-elected Sr. Jeanne as their mother general. And then the story took a nasty turn. Through giving spiritual advice to two of the Sisters, a priest named Auguste le Pailleur had started to gain a foothold in the community. Just weeks after the Sisters had re-elected Sr. Jeanne, Pailleur on his own authority declared the election void, and designated a 23-year-old Sister, Marie Jamet, as the new mother general. He moved in on a two-pronged plan to consolidate his authority. On the one hand, sensing that the time was opportune, he declared himself “father general” and took total control of the Order, and began falsifying documents to state that he had founded the Little Sisters. He committed an outright fraud in rewriting history, driven by the decision that history was to know him as founder of a religious congregation, and many actually believed him. On the other hand, he meticulously stripped Sr. Jeanne of her founding status and her role in the Council, and erased important records of her involvement in the community. He first reduced her participation to begging for aid. Then, not satisfied, he recalled her labours in the field altogether and placed her under restricted residence, physically confining her to the mother house, where the postulants and novices resided, with instructions never to claim her position and never to take part in the activities of the Little Sisters. It was a forced permanent retirement.
Confined to the shadows of the motherhouse for 27 years, so relegated did the future saint eventually become that younger sisters entering the order had no idea she was their foundress. Her true identity denied and her dignity robbed, she died in total oblivion. And all that time, she maintained her silence, living out what is often described as “obedience”.
Sr. Marie Jamet, the mother general Pailleur appointed to replace Sr. Jeanne, told an aid on her deathbed: “I am not the first Little Sister, nor the founder of the work. Jeanne Jugan was the first one and the founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor, but I was told to act as though I were.” Only then was the truth about Sr. Jeanne’s founding status restored. When Pailleur’s ruse became known he was eventually stripped of all his pretensions and sent to live out his life in a monastery.
Paul Milcent, author of the biography Jeanne Jugan: Humble So As to Love More, wrote: “The Abbé le Pailleur’s behavior has something odd about it, pointing to some kind of psychological disturbance. He was determined, even at the cost of falsifying the truth, to concentrate power and fame in his own person.”
The foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor died unrecognized, even within her Order, only to receive the fullness of recognition denied her in life some 150 years later. The spirituality of St Jugan on many fronts is challenging enough anywhere anytime. But this particular dimension – her suffering in total silence, in total eclipse, in seeming “obedience” (whatever that meant), and her passing in total ignominy – is shocking to the core. It is by far the most difficult aspect of St Jugan’s spirituality for today. Above all else, this is the one dimension of her spirituality which we would like to see the Ephphatha Coffee Corner conversations grapple with. What do you think happened? And what depth spirituality are we dealing with here?
The importance of the people of God speaking up against evil committed in society at large and within the Church in particular cannot be over- emphasized. Our first post on “Esther and the Catholic Laity” takes that as our point of departure. Commenting on Pope Benedict XVI’s recent pastoral letter to Ireland on the colossal sex scandal in that country, Vaticn spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi said on March 21 that the Holy Father has always worked against the culture of silence in regard to the abuse committed by priests. So why did Sr. Jeanne Jugan keep quiet in the face of atrocious evil committed against her? And why did the other Sisters keep quiet as well and thereby allowed evil to thrive with impunity? Was it an attitude of “indifference” which we must now challenge? Was such “inaction” the illegitimate fruit of a misplaced “obedience” which we must now call into question? Or are there, deep down, alternative explanations for a spirituality of “silence” which is a glorious part of St Jugan’s charism? What is the spiritual content of that deafening silence?… We shall explore all these in part II of this article.
[Part II of St Jugan’s story will appear in the next post, on 16 April 2010.]
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, March 2010. All rights reserved.
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