Jeanne Jugan

Posted on August 30, 2002 in Courage & Activism Myths & Mysticism

Though I no longer attend Mass or consider myself a Catholic, I still enjoy reading the lives of the saints. Today, my hagriography informed me, was the feast of Blessed Jeanne Jugan, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor. In these days following the excommunication of those women who had the temerity to be ordained as priests, I think her story demonstrates very nicely the danger inherent in any established religious authority, particularly those based on accidents of biology such as sex.

Jugan had her due claim to founding the order taken from her, for a time, by a priest who was eager to stake his own claim to sainthood. This little fact gets left out at the Catholic saints site, but not in Robert Ellsberg’s excellent book of days All Saints. I hope I am not destroying Jugan’s chance for sainthood when I use her to point out that she was a victim of the male hierarchy. Her superior, one Father Le Pailleur, exiled her to the interior of her own convent where she spent the rest of her life directing postulants in manual labor. Le Pailleur convinced the Vatican that he had founded the Sisters of Charity and, as the recognized head of the order, moved quickly to put his rival claimant in a place where she could not gainsay him.

The truth did come out, eventually. Sister Jugan’s story is a good one — that of a pious woman who remains faithful to her calling even though the wreath of glory that she deserves is snatched by another. But while the life of Sr. Jurgan delights the imagination and swells the chest with breathy rapture, it serves the current Vatican authority in a way that resists change. The moral they want us to glean from Sr. Jugan’s story is that truth will triumph over falsehood if one remains faithful to the end.

When John Paul II beatified her in 1982, I am sure he wanted to extol her willingness to obey. The true glory of a saint, I feel, however, comes not from living the life expected of her by others but by revolutionizing it. John Paul retains the male-only priesthood that both victimized her and allowed no place in Catholic communion for conscientious objection. The evils that led to Sister Jugan’s exploitation remain. Now John Paul would leave her to hang on the wall as a mere icon, taking prayers from and offering strength to those who keep the silence, the terrible, terrible silence of those who must keep the secrets of an unrebukeable clergy.