The little girl stood beside the family well as her mother filled her bucket. ‘Oh! How I’d like to have a well of gold to give some to all the unfortunate, so that there wouldn't be any more poor people at all and so no one would cry.’

The year was 1807 and Pauline Jaricot was eight years old. Little did she then know that she would spend her life creating many miniature life-giving wells from which literally millions of poor people across the world would draw hope. Although she herself would shed many tears during her sixty-three years, her time and energy would be completely dedicated to alleviating the pain of others. Indeed, Pope Paul VI would say, ‘More than others, Pauline had to encounter, accept, and overcome with love a number of objections, defeats, humiliations, and renunciations which would give her work the mark of the cross and its mysterious fecundity’.

She would spend her life creating many miniature life-giving wells from which literally millions of poor people across the world would draw hopePauline was born in Lyons on 22 July 1799, the daughter of the owners of a silk factory, shortly after the closure of the French Revolution. She was a very normal child with great imagination. From her early childhood, she and her brother Phileas, who was two years older, played ‘missionaries’ and dreamed of travelling to distant lands, especially to China, in order to spread the gospel message. In those days, China, with its ancient civilization, magnificent artwork and dazzlingly beautiful textiles, captured the popular imagination. Meanwhile, the stories told by intrepid missionaries painted a picture of a vast land with ‘fields white for the harvest’ if only more Christians could undertake to imitate their endeavours. Again and again, they appealed for funds and materials to support their work amongst the ‘Descendants of the Dragon’, as the Chinese still call themselves.

There was one problem: Pauline was a girl and Phileas was a boy. She was automatically excluded from any major attempt to become a foreign missionary at a time when even religious sisters were not seriously considered to have a vital role to play outside the strict enclosure of Contemplative orders. Phileas was sympathetic, but as he was ordained and headed towards China, he consoled her (he thought) by saying, ‘Little sister, you cannot come; but you shall take a rake, rake in heaps of gold and you shall send it to me in barrels.’

‘Pauline, you are too stupid to have thought up this plan… Clearly, it comes from God. Also, not only do I permit it, but I strongly advise you to put it into operation!’In many ways Pauline was a daughter of her times, compelled to live within the chauvinist established social customs of nineteenth-century France, which dictated a vast selection of things which ‘a lady’ might or might not do. Yet Pauline was also way ahead of the society and Church into which she was born. Able to ‘think outside the box’ she conceived ingenious initiatives. It was such a simple idea to recruit ten people who would each encourage ten more who would, in turn, each find ten others. In no time at all, ten people would be one hundred and then one thousand.

Even the very poor could afford to contribute one monthly sou, the smallest coin in nineteenth-century French currency, to help support missions and missionaries – and that was exactly how Pauline started what is, today, the world’s oldest and largest missionary charity, the Association for the Propagation of the Faith (APF).

Yet when she spoke of her idea to her parish priest, he was scarcely complimentary even whilst encouraging her to continue! Father Würtz told her, ‘Pauline, you are too stupid to have thought up this plan… Clearly, it comes from God. Also, not only do I permit it, but I strongly advise you to put it into operation!’

Immediately Pauline called together two hundred girls in her brother’s silk factory, urging them to contribute towards the rescue of the abandoned babies in China whom Phileas had described in his letters. Phileas encouraged her to continue, writing to his sister saying, ‘Continue to propagate this work of charity. It is, possibly, the mustard seed that will produce an enormous tree, whose benevolent branches will overshadow the entire surface of the earth.’

Yet life was hard. The situation of the silk workers in Lyons, caught up in the tumult of the Industrial Revolution, mirrored the appalling conditions across the Channel in Britain. Pauline noted, ‘Poverty, little by little, weakens the worker’s courage and virtue... We must give him back the dignity of a father...’ She dedicated her wealth to the creation of an industrial centre where the poor would be justly compensated for their work. Sadly, the businessmen to whom she had entrusted the money for the enterprise embezzled it, leaving Pauline with a shattered reputation and massive debts. Her final years were a daily martyrdom of poverty, physical weakness, illness, abandonment by former friends and misunderstanding.

Yet whilst this venture floundered, the Association for the Propagation of the Faith flourished. In France alone, when Pauline died on 9 January 1862, she had gathered 2,250,000 people prepared to pray for and to support missionaries. In approving her cause on 3 June 1963, Pope John XXIII stated that it was Pauline Jaricot who ‘thought of the Society, who conceived it and made it an organised reality’.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Pauline Jaricot. Today as then, countless missionaries depend on the work of her band of helpers and their successors in Missio and the APF.

In 2010 England and Wales collected £424,225 on World Mission Sunday. This, along with all other Missio/APF monies, much of it through the generosity of the Red Box holders, was distributed to projects in forty-nine dioceses in Africa and Asia. The ‘mustard seed’ now has 159 national offices across the world. Pauline’s missionary dream became a reality, her faith giving life and sustaining hope.

To learn more about the Association for the
Propagation of the Faith (APF), go to:
www.missio.org.uk