All Saints - St. Jeanne Jugan
St. Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
Apoc 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Mt 5:1-12
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
1 Nov 2009
Today the Feast of All Saints is celebrated unusually on the first Sunday of November and here in Sydney we are using today's feast to commemorate the canonization in Rome three weeks ago of Sister Jeanne Jugan, the founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
The Little Sisters have more than 2,700 sisters from 48 nations running 202 homes for the aged throughout the world. In Australia they have houses at Northcote in Victoria, at Perth and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and also at Randwick where they care for a number of our retired priests, Cardinal Clancy, Bishop Brennan and Bishop Murray, as well as a much larger group of lay people and especially the poor.
As people are living longer and many wives as well as husbands are involved in full time work outside the home, the care for the aged is an increasing responsibility taken up more and more by those outside the family. The sisters therefore meet an ancient need which is increasing in our times. The Sydney clergy in particular owe special gratitude to the followers of St. Mary of the Cross Jugan for the care they bestow on all our brother priests, who have retired.
First of all though, before speaking about St. Jeanne, we should say a few words about the significance of the feast of All Saints, which stresses for us the importance of recognizing the reality of life after death and today with its emphasis on the saints, unlike tomorrow we concentrate on those who are models for us, wonderful exemplars of faith, hope and love in action, often in the most difficult situations.
We can be tempted to place the saints in an ideal world which never existed, where it was much easier to believe and be good than it is today, and where these saints lived an easy life in peace and harmony without any or much strife and struggle.
The first reading today is a bit off-putting because it explicitly mentions the struggle between good and evil, the damage and devastation that sometimes occurs in this struggle and the faithful remnant, the 144,000 marked with the seal of the Spirit on their foreheads and then the immense number, impossible to count from every nation, race, tribe and language, of those dressed in white and carrying palms, standing around the throne of God and the Lamb, bowing, worshipping and praising God.
These are all those over the centuries who have persevered in their witness to the faith through persecution, given their lives and have washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb.
Heaven is something completely outside our standards and expectations. Even the best parties tend to drag if they go on too long; although "too long" is judged differently by different people! Therefore the dramatic imaging and language of the Apocalypse or Book of Revelations is closer to explaining the eternal now of Heaven, where the Infinite love of God will keep us satisfied and happy for ever.
The Creator God is a fantastic mathematician and an unbelievably inventive maker of life forms. We can be sure that Our God is also a unbelievably successful judge, balancing out the scales of justice in eternity, because these scales do not balance in this life. Our God of love, who gave us personal freedom, limited perhaps but completely real, needs life after death to complete his plan. We are not slaves, not oppressed foreign subjects, but the children of a loving Father, and we can confidently hope for the best. Good fathers do not disappoint their children if their expectations are realistic and appropriate. And Christ has told us that expectations of an after life are legitimate.
Jeanne Jugan was born into a poor family in Cancale, France in 1792 during the French Revolution, which espoused liberty, equality and fraternity. The ideal of fraternity did not prevent them from executing the King and queen, many others and many clergy and religious. Most of the next fifty or sixty years was very difficult for religion in France, even under Napoleon, who imprisoned two popes Pius VI and Pius VII. But this period saw a remarkable and unexpected revival of Catholic life with St. John Vianney, and the foundation of the Marist brothers, the De La Salle brothers, the Blessed Sacrament fathers, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and of course the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Jeanne, the last of six children, lost her father at sea when she was only three years old and went to work at the age of eighteen in the kitchen of a local countess. She had a type of religious conversion, certainly a deepening of her faith, while attending a mission in her home town in 1816. It was then she turned down a proposal of marriage, convinced that God had some plan for her which she did not yet recognize.
A year later she commenced work as a nurse's aide in Le Rosa's hospital and entered the Third Order of the Admirable Mother, a lay group founded in the seventeenth century by St. John Eudes.
After leaving the hospital she spent a deal of time visiting the poor and then in the winter of 1839 with two companions she took into her home an elderly and infirm blind woman, gave up her bed to the newcomer and slept in the attic.
She was encouraged in her work by the Brothers of St. John of God, and four years later, in 1843, the small initial group had forty other workers who chose her as their superior as they adopted religious life.
None of this is unusual in the stories of founders of religious orders, but what followed is. She was soon removed from this responsibility and given the difficult task of collecting money for the work. More and more she was pushed into the background, so that she lived quietly in obscurity for twenty-three years and the story of the beginning of the order was rewritten, so that her role as founder was forgotten and she was described as only of the early joiners, the third Little Sister. She responded to this injustice with silence, gentleness and abandonment. It was only twenty-three years after her death in 1879 that the true story was brought to light.
Saints come in all spiritual shapes and sizes and from every part of the Catholic world. We hope Mary MacKillop will be canonized next year.
But all the saints are outstanding for their faith, hope and love and none of them had an easy run. They are all worthy of imitation and have earned our admiration.
Today we join the Little Sisters of the Poor as we rejoice with all their sisters and friends around the world in the canonization of their founder St. Jeanne Jugan.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
