At Naples in Campania, Saint Jeanne-Antide Thouret, virgin, who resumed the religious life that had been interrupted during the French Revolution, together with some companions, whom she gathered at Besançon into a new Society of Sisters of Charity, dedicated to the Christian and civic education of youth and to charity toward abandoned children, the poor, and the sick, until, afflicted by great tribulations, she died.
Lifespan: 1765–1826
Beatified: 23 May 1926 by Pope Pius XI
Canonized: 14 May 1934 by Pope Pius XI, Vatican Basilica
Memoria liturgica: 24 August
“I am a daughter of the Church; be so with me.”
Jeanne-Antide Thouret was born into poverty in a farming family in the French village of Sancey-le-Long on 27 November 1765.
Left motherless at only sixteen, she took her mother’s place in the household and in the fields. The only one who could console her in that immense grief was the Virgin Mary. Jeanne-Antide was particularly devoted to Our Lady: Mary became for her a true mother when her earthly mother left her alone. Within her a vocation to religious life was also taking shape, though she would first have to overcome her father’s refusal to let her go.
At twenty-two, Jeanne-Antide entered the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris. Then the French Revolution broke out and all religious orders were suppressed. She followed Abbé Receveur into exile in Freiburg, in Germany, where she devoted herself to the care of the sick and to the rehabilitation of young women. She then went on to Switzerland, and finally made her way back to France, to Besançon, where in 1797 she opened a school for poor girls — without abandoning the care of the sick. Other young women joined her: this became the founding nucleus of the new Congregation, the Daughters of Charity, which in 1819 received the approval of Pope Pius VII, who granted them exemption from episcopal jurisdiction.
This papal concession would mark the beginning of a true Calvary for Jeanne-Antide. The Bishop of Besançon, despite the pontifical recognition, refused to permit the congregation to exist, insisting that it remain an institution under diocesan authority. When Jeanne-Antide journeyed to Rome to speak with the Pope about the situation, a new superior was elected in her place back in Besançon, who was even forbidden to receive her upon her return. Heartbroken to see the Institute divided, Jeanne-Antide resolved to withdraw, and went to Naples to direct a large hospital together with some sisters who had remained faithful to her. To them she entrusted her programme: the glory of God and the sanctification of the congregation’s members through works of mercy and heroic fidelity to the Holy See — a fidelity that earned her the title Filia Petri, Daughter of Peter.
Jeanne-Antide died in 1826 without seeing the reunification of the two branches of the institute she had founded, which would not come about until 1954. She was beatified and then canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1934.