St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret
Back Home Up Next

23 May 1988
Paris, France

My dear Sisters,

Let us this morning greet a saint who is a newcomer to our Vincentian liturgical calendar. It is now almost three years since the Holy See suggested to us that we honor St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret on 23 May. St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret would feel quite at ease and at home were she participating in this encounter. For, like you, she was called by God to the Community of the Daughters of Charity. Like you she had the experiences of the Seminary. Like you she cultivated the three characteristic virtues of a Daughter of Charity and lived the four vows of the Company. Like you she knew the spiritual teaching of our Founders and accepted the traditions of the Community.

Her Community life was shattered in pieces by the turbulence of the Revolution here in France some two hundred years ago. Jeanne-Antide Thouret was forced to return to her native locality and soon became, as she remarked, an exile on the roads of Europe. She continued to live according to the spirituality of her vocation, and because every Daughter of Charity is also a Daughter of Divine Providence according to the mind of St. Vincent, after some years Jeanne-Antide Thouret became the instrument of Divine Providence in the establishment of a new Community, which came to be known as Sisters of Charity of St. Jeanne-Antide.

The fact that St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret tried to follow the lead of Divine Providence did not spare her from intense sufferings. Because of a difficult political situation and the small-minded action on the part of an archbishop, St. Jeanne-Antide had the painful experience of not being allowed to enter the first house of the Congregation which she had founded in Besançon, France. She accepted the cross without recrimination and returned to Naples, Italy, where she died in the sixtieth year of her age on the 24 August 1826.

I do not need to tell you, my dear Sisters, that her life was distinguished by service of the poor, and that the Rule she gave her Community (which today numbers eight thousand) comprised all that she could remember of the Rule of the Daughters of Charity, with which she became acquainted in her Seminary days in the Mother House here in Paris.

St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret lived her days in great perplexity, a perplexity caused by the upheaval of the Revolution, by the dispersal of the Community she had come to know and love, and by the conflict with the bishop of Besançon. Perplexity can be destabilizing, and part of the greatness of St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret lay in her ability to be stable in the midst of perplexity. For that reason she is a saint for our times, and I may say, a saint for the Visitatrixes of today. The poor increase in numbers, while, at least in many Provinces, the number of Sisters declines. Social and political situations are more complex. You, as Visitatrixes, are called to give direction to a Province in this perplexing situation. At times you must feel, as St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret did, like an exile on the roads of the world. Where can one find stability? Only in the person of Jesus Christ: only in what I might call the seven special gifts of the Spirit to the Community, the three virtues and the four vows: only in recourse to the Mother of God, whom we greet as the Morning Star. "O my Merciful Jesus," prayed St. Jeanne-Antide Thouret, "you have all power over hearts. You can convert them....Make me know your will and your plans and all that you wish that I do....I commit everything to your Fatherly goodness in which I trust perfectly and always." (Office of Readings for the feast).

May we be given, through the intercession of St. Jeanne, stability amid perplexity and the grace of being content to live our entire lives without the satisfaction of smoothing out the creases in God's great tapestry.

Web Design by Beth Nicol