Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Fides Service) - The purpose of the Pontifical Mission Societies is to increase awareness of the Church’s missionary nature and the duty of all Christians to share in her missionary activity. World Mission Sunday the most important missionary event of the year known and celebrated all over the world and now a tradition was inspired and started at the request of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The four Pontifical Mission Societies , Propagation of the Faith, St Peter Apostle, Holy Childhood, Missionary Union, although founded separately and at different times, form one institution with the one and the same goal in common: to promote a spirit of universal mission among the People of God, that is the Church.
The Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith is the fruit of the charisma of a young French woman Pauline Marie Jaricot who lived in Lyon. In 1816 at the age of 17 Pauline decided to give up her comfortable life and with a group of young women who worked at her father’s factory she started a spiritual association of women with the name “Women of Reparation”. Two years later the group decided to commit itself to praying for the mission and encourage others to do the same and "cooperate in the work of spreading the Gospel" with a weekly offering. Today the Society is present in 120 different countries. We can summarise its great contribution to the Church as prophetic and charismatic. The foundress put Mission at the centre of the life of the Church underlining the value of prayer and the duty of all Christians, even the poorest, to help the work of evangelisation. The importance today of this Society is such that without the prayers and the sacrifices and offerings it collects for the missions which form the Universal Fund of Solidarity the work of evangelisation and also material development would have been far more limited.
Biography - Pauline Marie Jaricot was born on 22 July 1799 in Lyon (France), the daughter of a well to do family. At the age of 17 she started a life of intense prayer and path of spiritual searching. She joined an Association belonging to the Missionary Society of Paris for Foreign Missions which asked for prayers and money to support missionary work in the Far East. But she is not satisfied and dreams of finding another simpler way of involving everyone in missionary efforts. In Autumn 1819 while she was praying she had an inspiration on how to assure stable, organised and universal help for the missions: she would build a fraternity chain of groups of ten people committed to prayer, making and collecting offerings and finding new members. So on 3 May 1822 a group of lay people formed a Council for the Propagation of the Faith for all missions. In 1826 she organised Living Rosary, as contact between the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyon and the de Propaganda Fide Congregation in Rome became ever more frequent.
From France the Society spread rapidly to Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain and then all over Europe. In 1831 she organised the “Daughters of Mary”, women religious who wore civilian and performed works of charity. In 1845, seeing the poor living conditions of the working classes she started a Women Workers Society with its own workshop. But the initiative proved out of proportion to her strength. Soon, deceived by a profiteer, it went bankrupt. Abandoned by all, Pauline took refuge in God with John Vianney the Cure d’ Ars as her spiritual father. She died in Lyon on 9 January 1862. On 3 May 1922 Pope Pius XI raised the Society for the Propagation of the Faith to the rank of Pontifical with a decree Romanorum Pontificum. In 1963 Pope John XXIII proclaimed the heroic virtues of Pauline Marie Jaricot and the process of her beatification is now underway. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 4/5/2005 - Righe 42; Parole 611)
