We human beings need heroes and heroines, people similar to us who inspire us and who encourage us to reach beyond the ordinary and to try to be more than what we initially thought we could be; we need to be reminded by way of example that we can, through God’s grace, achieve our God-given destiny: eternal life.

This need for heroes and heroines is equally true in our living the life of faith. So, God, in His loving mercy towards us, gives us Christian heroes and heroines: saints we call them. Many saints have never been officially proclaimed as saints, so on November 1, we honor all the saints. Others are so proclaimed — canonized — in order to give us a fresh awareness of our innate need for people to imitate and also the solid assurance that these men and women are truly with God forever in His eternal home and that they are now our intercessors and authentic models for us to imitate: Christian heroes and heroines.

On Sunday morning, October 11, 2009, at the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI added five people to the rolls of canonized saints. Among them was the saint we are honoring this morning in our Cathedral: Jeanne Jugan, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose religious name was Sister Mary of the Cross. This is how our Holy Father expressed the way in which every disciple of Christ should respond to Christ’s call to follow Him in the path of holiness. First, he described Christ’s call. “‘Come, follow me….’ This is the Christian vocation which is born from the Lord's proposal of love and can only be fulfilled in our loving response. Jesus invites his disciples to give their lives completely, without calculation or personal interest, with unreserved trust in God” (Homily on October 11, 2009).

Then, he described how saints respond to Christ’s call. “Saints accept this demanding invitation and set out with humble docility in the following of the Crucified and Risen Christ. Their perfection, in the logic of faith — sometimes humanly incomprehensible — consists in no longer putting themselves at the centre but in choosing to go against the tide, living in line with the Gospel” (Ibid.).

Jeanne Jugan was born in France in 1792 and died there in 1879. She learned in her heart and then lived in her life that the kind of fasting most acceptable to God is denying our will and doing His. The words in today’s first reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah struck deeply within her being: “Thus says the Lord: this is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly,…sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless…” As a young woman, barely out of her teens, she felt the call of Jesus to be entirely His. Many years later, she discovered the precise nature of His call: to take care of the elderly poor. This was made clear to her when, on one cold winter night, in 1839, she met an elderly, blind and infirm woman who had no one to care for her. Jeanne realized that Jesus Christ identified Himself with this poor woman, so she carried her home and placed her in her own bed. From that time on, Jeanne would sleep in the attic. Thus, the work of the Little Sisters of the Poor began. In effect, Jeanne Jugan and all her daughters live out, not in words but in actions, what Jesus told us in today’s Gospel from Saint Matthew’s account: “For I was hungry and you gave me food,…a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me….Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for the least brothers of mine you did for me.” Yes, Jeanne Jugan faithfully responded to God’s call, denying her will and doing His. This is precisely why the Church proclaims her a saint and holds her up before us as a heroine in faith whom we can imitate.

More precisely, how and why is Saint Jeanne Jugan a source of inspiration, a beacon of encouragement, someone to imitate in our time? Among the responses I could give, I propose two: her care for the elderly poor and her trust in Divine Providence and surrender to God’s Will.

We have already reflected on her care for the elderly poor. Not only did she herself give her entire life to this Gospel work of mercy but she gathered other women to join her and to continue what she began, even to this day. In our times, the elderly, both poor and not so poor, are so often forgotten or neglected. And those elderly who are indeed in dire poverty live without shelter or food or friends. Saint Jeanne Jugan teaches us how to reach out to the elderly, not only with prayer, though this is essential, but also with kindness that is tangible and with our resources. Pope Benedict XVI observed: “By her admirable work at the service of the most deprived elderly, St Mary of the Cross [Jeanne Jugan] is also like a beacon to guide our societies which must always rediscover the place and the unique contribution of this period of life….Her charism is ever timely while so many elderly people are suffering from numerous forms of poverty and solitude and are sometimes also abandoned by their families” (Op. Cit.).

Saint Jeanne is also a source of inspiration and a model for imitation in her trust in Divine Providence and in her surrender to God’s Will. She truly founded the Little Sisters of the Poor, but in 1843, when she had been re-elected Superior, the priest who had been her counselor, solely on his own authority, named a twenty-one year old sister to be the superior and in 1852, the bishop appointed this priest to be the Superior General. The priest then called Jeanne Jugan back to the Motherhouse where she lived the remaining twenty-seven years of her life in obscurity, even to the point of learning that more and more she was considered to never have been the founder. Yet, though deeply hurt—how could she not be, she counsels us: “Go and find him when your patience and strength run out and you feel alone and helpless. Jesus is waiting for you in the chapel. Say to him, ‘Jesus, you know exactly what is going on. You are all I have, and you know all things. Come to my help.’ And then go, and don’t worry about how you are going to manage. That you have told God about it is enough. He has a good memory.”

So often, you and I ask “why”. We often face things that seem so unfair, so difficult, so insolvable! Saint Jeanne Jugan shows us how to continue on, not denying the reality we face, but trusting in God’s loving providence, even in the dark!

Yes, we need heroes and heroines in living the life of faith. In Saint Jeanne Jugan, God gives us such a heroine to inspire us, to encourage us, to show us how to transcend the self to become one with Him. As our Holy Father stated towards the end of his homily, “May St. Jeanne Jugan be for elderly people a living source of hope and for those who generously commit themselves to serving them, a powerful incentive to pursue and develop her work” (Op. Cit.). May Saint Jeanne Jugan show us how to trust in Divine Providence and to surrender our will to God’s Will. Amen.