Anne-Marie
Javouhey
1779 - 1851
Anne-Marie Javouhey, founder of the St. Joseph
of Cluny Order of Sisters, was a remarkable
woman with ideas well ahead of her time. All
through her life, she lived her faith through
concrete actions focused on the needs of people
around her. These actions centered on three
main areas:
-
her
devotion to helping people who were suffering
- either through sickness or poverty;
-
looking
after the educational needs of children;
-
her
strong desire to help peoples of all races
and in particular, to fight the evil of slavery.
All
of these became central themes in the work of
the St. Joseph of Cluny Sisters. Indeed, these
themes are very much at the heart of the work
of the Order in today's world. There are modern
forms of slavery which are just as damaging as
the original form. Marginalisation; poverty; drugs;
prostitution; promiscuity; violence; the frantic
pursuit of wealth - are just some of the modern
forms of slavery that ruin the lives of many people.
And wherever Anne-Marie Javouhey's Cluny Order
is working in today's world they continue to fight
each of these modern scourges that prevent people
from reaching their full potential as children
of God.
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A
Brief Biography
Anne Marie Javouhey was born in the modest village
of Jalanges in the Dijon area of eastern France.
But from these humble beginnings, she would
eventually travel to many remote and dangerous
parts of the world - in an era when the vast
majority of people during their whole lives
never traveled much further than to their neighbouring
villages or provincial town. Anne Marie Javouhey
was a woman with a strong mission from God and
her inspirational crusading spirit led her to
found a religious Order that still works and
thrives in the world of the 21st century.
She was genuinely a woman ahead of her time
as evidenced by the comments of the great of
the good who knew of her and her works: Pope
Pius IX referred to her as "the first
woman missionary";
Louis-Philippe
of France described her as "A
Great Man"
-- an epithet that today's feminists might
well want to quarrel with, but taking the comment
in the context of the 19th century, it is undoubtedly
an accolade of the highest order.Anne-Marie Javouhey
was born in 1779, to the family of the local Mayor
-- Balthazar Javouhey -- and was baptised as Anne:
the "Marie"
was to be added later, and was a mark of
her devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Within the
family she was known simply as "Nannette".
Her
birth came at a time when the simmering unrest
that was to end in full-blown revolution was already
spreading through France. She was nine years old
when the Paris mob stormed the Bastille,
and she was barely fourteen when the French royal
family was beheaded by the revolutionaries.
It is a part of Anne-Marie's legend that despite
her extreme youth she helped the priests who had
been outlawed after the Civil Constitution of
the Clergy was passed - the infamous law that
required the clergy to swear an oath of allegiance
to the secular state, and that drove so many of
them underground and made exiles and criminals
of the ones who refused to take the oath.The helping
of those priests -- bringing them to administer
to the dying, and making it possible for them
to say Mass in secret -- was perhaps Anne-Marie's
first real crusade. Neither her youth nor the
very real danger of her actions deterred her.
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Education
At
the same time, she saw the importance of education for
children. She set about gathering the local children,
and preparing them to receive the sacraments. And hinting
at the distant travels that would be part of her life's
work, she had a dream in which St. Teresa of Avila showed
to her children of different races whom God wished to
confide to Anne-Marie's care. It was a dream that was
to stay with Anne-Marie throughout all the years ahead.
Children - the care of them, the educating of them - over
and over this was to be a recurring thread in her life.
Her family supported
her strongly in her first endeavours with the local children;
there is a delightfully human story of how her father
arranged for her to borrow the village drum so that she
could summon the children to her classes for religious
instruction. Perhaps she stood outside a local schoolroom,
enthusiastically beating the loaned drum, or perhaps she
even marched through the streets of her home with the
children falling into line behind her. No matter how she
called them, they came to her.
By this time, she was already strongly aware of her own
vocation. In later years she was to write, "I
still see the place where I was ploughing when God made
known His Will to me..."
But if she was sure, her father had doubts. He apparently
thought Anne-Marie was "too mischievous"
to receive her First Communion at the age of nine, and
worried that she might be "too
unstable" to undertake the religious life
she sought at nineteen when she consecrated her life to
God, forced to do so in secrecy since public worship was
still banned in France.
So Anne-Marie waited, believing that,
"God has His designs He
will make them known in time... He is in no hurry..."
In 1802 she wrote to her father, "All
your refusals will not discourage me... I think my heart
would have to be snatched out to take away my desire for
the religious life."
But Balthazar was not to remain implacable; indeed, he
was later to be of the greatest help to Anne-Marie, and
the waiting time she endured was worthwhile. Perhaps also
it was valuable to her as a period of learning, of gathering
experience and understanding, and of building up the spiritual
strength that was to accompany her throughout her life.
As a later generation of her nuns was to say, there is
a time and a state of grace for everything.
In the achieving of any goal, it is sometimes necessary
to explore routes that do not take the seeker onto the
desired road, but that must, perforce, be explored in
order to be sure.
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Besançon
Anne-Marie,
exploring possibilities in these early years, perhaps
trying to perceive the exact shape and colour of her vocation,
tried a number of different paths upon which to follow
what she believed was God's will for her. For a time she
lived with a Trappist Order in Switzerland, and she also
tried her vocation in Besançon,
in southern France.These were good roads, and they were
worthy and devout roads, but none of them were the road
she sought. Even so these years and these roads played
their part in her life, for it seems to have been during
this time that she became gradually convinced that her
true vocation lay in the founding of a completely new
religious Order. By any standards this would have been
an awesome undertaking, but to a girl who was still only
in her twenties, the difficulties must have seemed insurmountable.Or
did they? By 1806. in the town
of Chalon, she had succeeded in establishing an Institute,
which she dedicated to St. Joseph. Her father - who would
still have preferred his daughter to remain at home on
the family farm and marry some suitable young man - nevertheless
gave her immense practical support, buying rooms and houses
in which she could work towards her dream of educating
children and orphans.
One of the buildings he bought was in Cluny - the former
Recollets Convent - and it was only a few years after
its purchase that the church and state both gave recognition
to the small congregation of nine nuns - four of whom
were Anne-Marie's own sisters.The Order was henceforth
to be officially known as the Sisters of St Joseph of
Cluny.
And so a piece of history was made.Now Anne-Marie's work
could really begin, and as the numbers of the Convent
increased, the never-forgotten dream of St.
Teresa of Avila and the children began to take on
real substance.
There were years of steady progress and expansion. More
novices joined Anne-Marie, and a Paris House was founded
shortly after the Cluny one - the "School
of the Marsh".The course should have seemed set fair,
but she was tormented by doubts, and by loneliness and
difficulties. So much had been destroyed by the Revolution
- not only money, but whole communities had been lost.
"Everything seems to make this project impossible..."
she wrote.The Paris project was an immense struggle;
there was no money, no resources of any kind, and life
had to be lived at its sparsest. It was necessary to draw
water from the Seine in order to drink and wash, and food
came mostly from leftovers in the markets, although once
again, Balthazar Javouhey helped, sending cart loads of
food for the small community.
Undaunted by the many obstacles and difficulties, Anne-Marie
began her school for the poor, and in time her work became
noticed. People in ministerial circles saw and approved
of what she was doing, and in 1814 she was asked to travel
to the French Colonies to help with the organising of
schools and hospitals. It was work dear to her heart,
of course, and she accepted.So it from those early struggles
came the beginnings of her real mission -- in 1817 Anne-Marie
and five other Sisters left for their long sea-voyage
to unknown lands.
Even to read the list of the places she visited is striking
- in particular when you consider the traveling conditions
of this era. The Sisters' first visit was to the island
of Reunion, near to Madagascar, then known as Bourbon,
but this was to be followed by Guadeloupe, Martinique,
St. Pierre et Miquelon, Pondichery,
Madagascar itself, and Mayotte. "The
perils of the sea do not frighten us," she wrote.
"Our aim is the hope of doing good, of winning a
few souls for religion, of alleviating the poor sick and
sustaining their courage in the midst of the greatest
dangers..."
In 1822 she traveled to Senegal and Sierra Leone on the
continent of Africa. Anne-Marie had to cope with poverty
and ignorance, and with disease and cruelty, and she had
to contend with the arrogance and prejudice of many of
the slave owners. Despite it, she took Africa to her heart,
and was fired with fresh zeal to help its people and improve
their lives.
Ahead
of Her Time
Way
ahead of her time, she expressed ideas that would only
gain true acceptance in later years. She spoke out for
the eminent dignity of all human beings, and she preached
fervently for equality, doing so at a time when the idea
of equality for all races, colours and creeds was scarcely
understood.
At her Beatification almost exactly a hundred years after
her death, Monsigneur Chappoulie, Bishop of Angers, said
of the journey she made to Senegal: "Between
the Mother Foundress of the Sisters of Cluny and the negro
people there was at once sealed an alliance which will
draw force from the supernatural love which this great
soul, entirely given over to Jesus Christ, bore to this
disinherited race..."?
By now she was truly an extraordinary woman.The Mana project
was worthy and inspired, and it must have been a venture
about which Anne-Marie cared passionately. A portion of
one of her letters describes their progress in the village
very vividly: "We brought
with us fifteen well chosen workmen... I visit their workshops
at least four times a day, starting with the carpenters
and cabinet-makers, then into the turners.., the shoe-makers..,
the sawmills, forge, boiler-makers, mechanics... When
I have finished, I come back by the cultivators: first
of all I visit the gardeners, then the men working on
the land, after which I go to take a rest near the Sisters,
whose work is quite equal to that of the men. It is in
the company of these good Sisters that I weed, plant beans
and manioc, sow rice and maize, while singing hymns and
telling stories, and regretting that our poor Sisters
in France cannot share our happiness... Our solitude is
watered by two beautiful navigable rivers full of fish;
every day we eat more or less fish according to the skill
of the fishermen: it costs us nothing and is a great economy
for the kitchen..."
It is, however, one of the ironies of her life that it
was her work in Mana that brought to a head the simmering
animosity directed against her, and that plunged her into
a period of such darkness.
Ever since her inauguration as Mother Superior of the
Order in 1835, there had been hostility from the Bishop
of Autun, and in addition, there were men in high positions
who still had the 'colonial' mentality towards slaves
- "The
safety of the white population rests on treating the negroes
in ignorance, and on treating them like beasts..."
"It is not slavery that has made these races lazy:
it is their laziness that has led them into slavery..."
She had to fight against this attitude, and she
had also to fight against misunderstandings. On one occasion
she had to cope with a more direct and more sinister hostility.
The resentful slave-owners had hatched a plan to stage
a river-boat accident, in order to rid themselves of this
troublesome French nun who seemed set on disrupting their
ordered lives. Such an act would be outright murder, but
it would be murder well disguised and they must have thought
there was a fair chance of success. But, as is so often
the case with plots, the details leaked out - perhaps
Anne-Marie had more supporters and more friends than the
slave-owners had bargained for - and information about
the plot was carried to her. Would she alter her plans
and her journey and so foil the plot? she was asked. She
would not. She went ahead with the journey as it had been
planned.
Even in today's modern world, it is easy enough to imagine
that journey and all the sights and the sounds and the
scents of nineteenth-century Guyana, South America, that
must have accompanied the travelers... The river-boat
making its ponderous way along some wide sluggish river,
Anne- Marie's companions anxiously scouring the banks
for enemies as they went along... But Anne-Marie herself
seems not to have faltered.
She trusted to God to protect her and she reached her
destination unscathed.
The harm she did suffer at that time was of a different
kind. Out of the plots and counter-plots that seem to
have surrounded her came the decree of the Prefect Apostolic
of Cayenne that she should be forbidden the sacraments.
It was a ban that was to last for 20 months, and they
must have been long and wearisome months for her.
Perhaps,
during that time, she clung to the glowing Old Testament
promise of, "A lamp unto
my feet and a light unto my path..."
What she referred to as her 'quasi-excommunication' was
at last brought to an end by the intervention of Pope
Gregory XVI, who issued an appeal to the Christian
world to finish, once and for all, the appalling trafficking
of human lives, and to put an end to slavery.
In 1845 the Bishop of Beauvais gave Anne-Marie his support,
and in 1849 the Archbishop of Paris authorized the establishment
of the principal novitiate at the Mother House in Paris.
The
lamp illuminating her path had burned steadily throughout.
The light had probably never so much as flickered.
Anne-Marie Javouhey was 64 when she returned to France;
even so, there were still achievements to delight her
- one in particular which was the receiving of a former
West Indian slave girl into the congregation. That long-ago
dream of St. Teresa of Avila was far more than just a
dream now.
Always ahead of her time, she had constantly shown interest
in the beliefs and the ways of people from other religions,
and it is recorded how, meeting people of the Muslim faith,
she expressed admiration for their piety, and talked to
them about their religion. It is impossible not to think
with what pleasure she would have welcomed Vatican II
and the blurring of the religious divisions, and with
what delight she would have recognised the crucible into
which the world's colours and races are today gradually
being brought together.She would have recognised the setbacks
and the difficulties as well, for setbacks and difficulties
had been part of her whole life.
She was 71 when she died, and by then there were 1,200
Sisters of the Order, working in Africa, Asia, Australia,
South America, Oceania, and the West Indies. Her travels
had been long and arduous and frequently dangerous, and
her life had been filled with the most extraordinary adventures
and achievements. Throughout it, she had been a crusader
for the rights of humanity, and for the equality of all
races and creeds - a freedom fighter before ever the phrase
was coined. She has left behind a remarkable legacy to
the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny who, with over 400
Houses throughout the world today, and more than 3,000
Sisters and Novices, still follow the example of her work
in teaching and nursing.
When she died, the liberated slaves in Mana held a week
of public mourning, and a statue was erected to her in
their Church square. The inscription reads, "Anne-Marie
Javouhey: 1779-1851. She was the Foundress and Mother
of Mana."
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