Blessed Rosalie Rendu

Blessed Rosalie Rendu was born Jeanne-Marie Rendu in Confort, France in 1786, just before the French Revolution. Growing up, her family hid priests who refused to take oaths to the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which among other things, banned monastic orders, forbade commitments to foreign powers (i.e. the pope), and made bishops and priests elected positions. The family’s home was a refuge as priests fled to nearby Switzerland. Jeanne-Marie received her first Communion in her family’s basement.

As a teenager, she was educated by the Ursuline Sisters. It was at boarding school that she encountered the Daughters of Charity who ran the local hospital. The novitiate had been suppressed during the Revolution and had reopened in 1800. In May of 1802, Jeanne-Marie joined the Daughters of Charity and was given the name Rosalie.

She was sent to a house in one of the most impoverished districts of Paris. The population of the city was swelling, causing crowded housing, dirty streets, and contaminated water. There was a lot of poverty and sickness.

She worked with the Napoleonic government’s Department of Welfare to create a program providing vouchers for coal and food for people in her district. She sought to meet the spiritual and material needs of the poor around her and always treated them with respect. Over time, she opened a free clinic, a pharmacy, a school, a child and maternal care center, a youth club for young workers, and a home for the elderly. During cholera outbreaks, she would event pick up dead bodies from the streets. In a political uprising, she climbed the barricades to help wounded fighters.

She always responded to the current need and the changing situations of her neighborhood. Not just the sick or just the poor or just the hungry; she sought to help each person’s needs. It was noted that she was particularly attentive to priests and religious suffering from psychiatric difficulties Her work became very well-known; even King Charles X and Emperor Napoleon III visited her.

Students in Paris started coming to her for advice and direction on how to serve the poor. She would direct them to houses and after would facilitate their reflections on their encounters. In 1833 she began mentoring the first members of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. In 1840, she helped re-establish the Ladies of Charity for lay women who wanted to serve the poor.

In the last two years of her life, she grew frail and blind. She died on Feb. 7, 1856. She was beatified in 2003. Her feast day is February 7.