Blessed Pauline Jaricot, Founder of the Propagation of the Faith and the Living Rosary

Who was Blessed Pauline Jaricot?

Blessed Pauline Jaricot was a young laywoman of Lyon, France, who found a way for ordinary Catholics to carry the whole Church's missions on their shoulders: a penny a week and a prayer a day. She was born on July 22, 1799, the youngest of seven children of a prosperous silk manufacturer, and baptized at the parish of Saint-Nizier. Out of her ideas came the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which still gathers the offerings of World Mission Sunday, and the Living Rosary, which still unites praying Catholics in groups of fifteen.

She died poor on January 9, 1862. The Church beatified her in Lyon on May 22, 2022. That day Pope Francis called her "a courageous woman, attentive to the changes taking place at the time," with "a universal vision regarding the Church's mission."

The life of Blessed Pauline

A conversion at seventeen

At about seventeen she was recovering from a bad fall when her mother died, and her grief sent her into a life of intense prayer. On Christmas Day, 1816, she made a vow of perpetual virginity. She gathered pious young women who worked as servants into a prayer union, the Réparatrices, to make amends to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

A penny a week for the missions

From about 1819 Pauline began collecting small weekly offerings among the women who worked in the family's silk mill. Her method was simple. Each collector found ten people to pray and to give a cent a week; each group of ten was linked to a larger group, and the money flowed to one treasurer.

On May 3, 1822, a meeting in Lyon formally founded the Society for the Propagation of the Faith on her method. Pope Pius VII approved it the following year. A plaque in Saint-Nizier, placed in 1922, says that the Lord inspired her "ardent love for souls" while she prayed before the altar of Our Lady of Grace in that church.

The Living Rosary

In 1826 she founded the Living Rosary. Each member prays one decade of the rosary a day, and fifteen members together complete the whole rosary every day. Pope Gregory XVI gave the association canonical status in 1832, and it spread far beyond France. In 1831 she also gathered the Daughters of Mary, women consecrated to God without a habit, who served the spread of the faith.

Healing, ruin and forgiveness

In 1835, gravely ill again, she set out on a pilgrimage to Italy and was healed on the way. She credited the cure to St. Philomena, and her friend St. John Vianney, once her family's parish priest, shared that devotion. Back in Lyon she lived at Lorette, a house on the hill of Fourvière, which became the center of her works.

In 1845 she bought an ironworks to build a Christian workplace, with housing, a school and a chapel for the workers. The men she trusted to run it defrauded her, and she lost everything. She spent her last years paying debts, begging, and preaching forgiveness. She died destitute.

The miracle of Blessed Pauline Jaricot

The healing approved for her beatification is approved. In 2012 a girl of about three, Mayline Tran, choked on a piece of food. According to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, she went without oxygen for about thirty minutes, her heart stopped, and she reached the hospital alive but in a vegetative coma. Doctors told her parents that if she lived, she would never walk or speak. The mother of a school friend, a member of the Living Rosary, had been present and at once began asking Pauline's prayers, and others joined. From July her condition improved sharply, and she recovered completely.

A diocesan inquiry in Lyon examined the case in 2018 and 2019. The Vatican medical board declared the healing "rapid, complete, lasting and inexplicable" on September 19, 2019, the theologians and cardinals agreed, and Pope Francis approved the miracle in 2020. Mayline attended the beatification at thirteen.

Why missionaries ask her prayers

Pauline never left France, but she gave the missions their daily bread. The Pontifical Mission Societies honor her as their founder, and it is natural for missionaries and all who support the missions to ask her prayers. See more patronages on our patron saints page.

Symbols of Blessed Pauline in art

Pauline is shown as she appears in her portraits: a young woman with dark hair parted in the middle, a white dress and shawl, and a coral necklace. Devotional images add a rosary for the Living Rosary, a coin or offering box for the Propagation of the Faith, or a globe for the missions.

Feast day and where she is honored

We keep her memorial on January 9, the day of her death. Her tomb is in the Church of Saint-Nizier in Lyon, where she was baptized; a relic of her heart was carried in procession at her beatification. Her house at Lorette, on the Montée Saint-Barthélemy, is open to pilgrims. See other feasts on our feast days page.

Praying with Blessed Pauline

The simplest way to pray with Pauline is to do what she asked of her members: pray one decade of the rosary each day for the spread of the Gospel. Our guide to how to pray the rosary gives the prayers in full. Let us ask Blessed Pauline to pray for missionaries everywhere and for all who give from little.

Blessed Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.