Little Sisters of the Poor

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 42, 25 October 1923, Page 11

Little Sisters of the Poor

THEIR'PLACE OF ORIGIN IN BRITTANY; EIGHTY YEARS OF MARVELLOUS EXPANSION. (From a Special Correspondent in Brittany to the Irish Catholic.) There are half-a-dozen different Communities of nuns in this seaport region of Northern Brittany where I have been spending the past few months, and in my ignorance of ecclesiastical detail I did not even recognise the uniform of the Little Sisters of the Poor when 1 opened the - door the other day and found myself confronted by two good nuns who were going their rounds for alms. One of them was of middle age and obviously French; the other quite young and with the dark eyes and complexion of the South. They realised at once that I was not a Frenchman; and the elder of the two began to speak to me fluently, but with a delightfully foreign accent, in English. I explained that I was not an Englishman but Irish/--, and the elder nun brightened immediately, and said that she had lived, long enough in the “States” to realise how deep was the difference between the two nationalities. It* ' was in the United States that she had acquired her excellent command of English; but I had indeed guessed as much after a few sentences had enabled me to locate her accent/. V. Her young companion, she told me, came from so far away as Spain, which rather surprised me, but she went on to tell me that there were Sisters of many different nationalities in the Convent of St. Servan, from which they had come to collect alms for their old men- in my neighborhood. “We have an Irish Sister amongst us, too,” she said delightedly, “and it is seldom that there is not at least one Irish nun in the Community.”. My interest was naturally aroused, and I explained that I was a journalist, and was deeply interested in the Catholic movement in Prance. I said that, of course, I knew the work- of the Little Sisters of the Poor at home, and that I would like to write about their work in France for v Gatholio newspaper in Ireland. N ' ' On hearing this the two good nuns became eager all , at once. They pressed me to know was their any chance of getting novices over from Ireland “for we need more Sisters so badly.” Rather taken aback by the suggestion -C? that I should become an agent for recruiting novices for the Little Sisters of the Poor, I answered that I wished I could do anything possible to help them, but that X. ! was afraid the Irish novitiates would have a first claim on Irish girls who wished to help ■in their splendid work.' In any case, Brittany was rather far for them to come. ; : And then the elder nun filled me with astonishment * by telling me that St. Servan was the first cradle of the - Order when it was founded barely more than eighty years / ago. I was —partly at learning that an Order whose activities I knew to be spread over most parts of the world, was not yet even a century old; but no less at the idea that the.moribund little town of St. Servan should be in any way associated with such a prodigious miracle of organisation, " • ‘ “Do tell me more,” I entreated, and the nuns—whose •. time was precious, for they had still a big round of calls to make in a short Winter afternoonexplained to me how S the'- Order had grown out > of the simple faith ' and charity of . one poor woman in St. Servan, Jeanne JugaU by name, > who had devoted herself, in spite of her own poverty, to • the care of a blind old woman in her own'garret. ,' , St. Servan is, in size and population, something like the town of Youghal. Jin the: days when St. ■ Malo/ barely a mile away, was v the > centre of the French East India! V

trade and the home of the famous corsair chieftains, St. Servan was a flourishing town enough. It is still full of fine old houses with large gardens where the corsair captains and the East Indian merchants would retire in. their old age. It also still has a fleet of some thirty or forty sailing ships which spend half of every year fishing for cod off the coast of Newfoundland. But for more than & century its prosperity has been steadily waning. Many of its houses are derelict and may be bought for a song, while its local industries are gradually dying out. Even in the year 1841, when Jeanne Jugan gave shelter to the first helpless old woman who was to be the nucleus of a vast army of aged wrecks in so many countries, before the century had reached it endeven then St. Servan was as unlike a modern industrial town as it is to-day. There can be few towns anywhere in Europe that are so free from the hardships of overcrowding. It has many squalid and dirty streets, but no quarter that would be described as a slum; its people suffer neither from destitution nor from unemployment. Yet this quaint, old, half-forgotten town in Brittany, which has so depressing an air of flickering out of life like a. candle that has burnt too low, was only eighty years ago the birthplace of a crusade for the relief of destitution in old age on a scale which can only be compared with that of the Red Cross organisation. This vast society of saints, who in ever increasing numbers are devoting their youth, their energy, and their capacity for love to the care of the old and homeless, and to the search for money for their, maintenance, grew not out of the stress of misery and unemployment in any industrial centre such as now make the greatest demands upon their assistance, but in a sleepy, decaying town on the north-west shores of France where modern industrial conditions are still completely unknown. And the wonderful woman who first set the example and then built up the Society which grouped associates'’in her’ charity from all parts of the world, to the appeal of a great public calamity, was no Florence Nightingale responding but a poor peasant woman whose own home was in a still more primitive fishing village near St. Servan, and whose sole inspiration was the desire to befriend and foster everyone who was helpless in her own immediate surroundings. “You must come and see the convent for yourself,” the good nun said to me kindly as she moved to take the road again. “Anyone will direct you to it, and over a money-box beside the gate you will see written the inscription, ‘ Mai£ the . hand that puts a sou for 'the poor in here be blessed by Jesus and by Mary ; so you will be a hundred times blessed,” she added charmingly, '‘for you have given me a hundred sous.” I had thought my poor five franc note a small contribution enough, and I was touched by this real gratitude. A few days afterwards the two nuns came to me again •not* to ask for money, they explained, for they never called for money more than once a month—but to bring me a little book about their Order, as they were passing by my house. It is indeed one of the most wonderful stories in all modern history, and the work of that modest peasant woman, Jeanne Jugan, has been much more enduring, as well as infinitely more worth while, than that of any Statesman in the history of the 19th century. The growth of Frederic Ozanam’s Vincent de Paul Society was not more wonderful than the incredible rapidity' with which the Little Sisters of the Poor began to come together and find one,' another all over France, and, within a very few years, over other countries as well. Jeanne Jugan took the blind old woman to live with her in 1840. Soon afterwards she had' collected a dozen homeless old men in a separate house. By 1846 her work had become so well known that other towns throughout Brittany began to form or to ask for similar homes for their destitute old men and women. By 1849 it had become established in Paris as well. Homes under the care . of the Little Sisters of the Poor sprang up all over France, North, South, East, and West, and spread into Belgium as well. In 1861 their work began in England also, and two years later in Spain. In 1868 the Little Sisters founded their first home in America, in 1869 in Italy. In 1882 they went to India; to Portugal and to Australia in 1884; to South America in 1885 ..to Constantinople in 1892; to Columbia in 1899; to Switzerland in 1900, and various new

countries have come to know their saintly mission since the beginning of the present century. Everywhere these good nuns have ■ gone out like pioneers, with their hands empty but with faith and hope .and charity indomitable in their hearts. This little record of their labors, compiled by the former chaplain of the Mother House of the Order (which is now situated some twenty miles inland from St. Servan, in the heart of the country) gives example after example, drawn from every part of the world, of their courage and their charity. In many towns they have, been invited and assisted by the municipal authorities to found new houses; but in all alike their main resource consists in begging from door to door—for money, for food, for. clothes, for anything that can serve any sort of purpose for the old men and women whom they have taken -under their protecting wings. Their resourcefulness is without limits. In one French town which was full of worn-out old people unable to continue their employment in the factories, the nun sent in charge of the new community found herself inundated with bills at the end of a few weeks. She solved a desperate problem by the happy inspiration of sending out the Sisters with the bills, telling them to sell each one, for whatever was written upon it, among the rich people of the town. Within twenty-four hours each bill had brought in the money needed to pay its creditor. Side by side with this splendid resourcefulness and enterprise in raising the money that is needed from day to day, the Little Sisters have shown everywhere the same extraordinary talent for utilising the craftsmanship of allthe miscellaneous professions that find their way into their homes. So the old people are kept happy, each with an occupation in which he or she has special skill. It gives them also the real happiness of knowing that, instead of being useless mouths, they are doing something, however small, to assist the work of the good Sisters who have given up all human ambitions and loves to minister to them, in the letter as well as in the ’ spirit of Christ’s teaching. <X*> *