Joan Antidea Thouret—born Jeanne-Antide Thouret—came into the world on 27 November 1765 in the village of Sancey-le-Long in Franche-Comté, France, the fifth child of a poor and deeply Christian peasant family. She was baptized the same day. From youth she felt drawn both to a stricter religious life and to the service of the poor.
When she was only sixteen her mother died. Joan took her mother's place in the household and in the fields, consoling her grief above all through a tender devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who became for her a true mother. A religious vocation grew within her, yet she had to overcome her father's refusal and the family's wish that she marry.
At twenty-two, in 1787, she entered the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, first at Langres and then at the motherhouse in Paris. As a postulant she experienced what she called her first "encounter" with Saint Vincent, beginning a lifelong spiritual father-daughter bond. She served the sick in hospitals at Sceaux, Paris, and Bray-sur-Somme. During the Revolution religious communities were suppressed. Refusing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, she was badly beaten by a soldier with a rifle butt. Ordered home, she would not abandon her vocation. In 1794 she returned for a time to Sancey; she even witnessed the execution of a Capuchin from a neighboring village and tried in vain to recover his head as a relic.
She then followed Abbé Antoine-Sylvestre Receveur into exile with his wandering community, caring for the sick and reclaiming young women in Switzerland and Germany. After a solitary journey of more than six hundred kilometers she returned to France. On 15 August 1797 she opened a school for poor girls in Besançon while continuing to nurse the sick. On 11 April 1799, with two young companions, she founded a free school and a soup kitchen for the poor—the first nucleus of a new congregation. From May to September 1802 she wrote a Rule of Life. On 23 September 1802 she began work among the prisoners of Bellevaux, teaching them, feeding them, and organizing paid labor. In 1807 the community received the official name Sisters of Charity of Besançon. New schools and hospitals multiplied; in 1810 she went with sisters to Thonon in Savoy and soon afterward, with eight sisters, to Naples, where she took charge of the Hospital of the Incurables, opened a school and a pharmacy, and went out to visit the poor.
On 23 July 1819 Pope Pius VII approved their Constitutions, naming them Sisters of Charity under the protection of Saint Vincent de Paul and granting exemption from ordinary episcopal jurisdiction. That papal favor became the start of a true calvary. The bishop of Besançon refused to accept the pontifical recognition and insisted the institute remain merely diocesan. While Joan was in Rome pleading the cause, a new superior was elected in Besançon and forbidden even to receive her on her return. With a broken heart she saw the institute divided. She desisted from forcing reunion and went to Naples with the sisters who remained faithful, entrusting to them her program: the glory of God and the sanctification of the members through the works of mercy and heroic fidelity to the Apostolic See—so much so that she earned the title "Filia Petri," Daughter of Peter.
She died in Naples of natural causes on 24 August 1826, without seeing the reunification of the two branches, which came only in 1953–1954. Pope Pius XI beatified her on 23 May 1926 and canonized her on 14 January 1934. A statue of her stands among the founders of religious orders in Saint Peter's Basilica. Her daughters continue her Vincentian charity across many countries.
May Saint Joan Antidea Thouret obtain for us a share in her unshaken fidelity to the Church, and let us practice today one concrete work of mercy for the poor.
