Saint Jeanne Jugan, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor

Jeanne Jugan was born in 1792 in Cancale, Brittany, France, into a poor fishing family. In 1839 she took an elderly blind woman into her home, marking the beginning of a ministry to the aged poor that grew into the congregation known as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She and her companions dedicated themselves to caring for destitute elderly people, begging alms to support their work. Though she founded the community, she was later pushed aside by a priest who took control of the congregation, and she spent her final decades in obscurity within the order she had started. She died in 1879 at the motherhouse in La Tour Saint-Joseph, France, and was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.