Little Sisters

A bustling yet other-worldly order are the Roman Catholic Little Sisters of the Poor. Familiar sights in many a U. S. city are the sisters, with their black habits, white starched caps tied under the chin. For sweet charity, to care for the aged poor who are their charges, the Little Sisters patiently make a nuisance of themselves by begging their way through shops, offices, the streets. They have been at it for 100 years, since their founder, Jeanne Jugan, joined with three friends to beg bread for some aged pensioners in the Breton village of St. Servan.

Little Sisters today maintain 307 old people's homes throughout the world. The 52 U. S. homes care for 50,000 oldsters--men & women over 60, of all faiths. Upon entering a home, inmates surrender their belongings, if any, to the order, thus become members of a "Little Family," call the superior "Good Mother." Many a home is now in a dither of pious excitement. With no regard for calendar dates, the Little Sisters have been celebrating their centenary. The mother house at St. Servan (which was a base hospital in World War I) celebrated in July, Brooklyn Little Sisters in August. In Detroit, where Little Sisters run the fine $1,000,000 Burtha M. Fisher Home, given by one of the famed, pious seven Fisher (bodies) brothers and his wife. Archbishop Edward Mooney said of the sisters: "They teach us, and they have taught us for 100 years, that the Gospel is not Utopian; that if you build charity on faith and hope, it works."

Vowed to hospitality as well as to poverty, chastity and obedience, Little Sisters accept gifts but not incomes or endowments which would require managing property. Once they went through city streets in horse-drawn vans, collecting food as well as money. Today each house has a trim truck, in which sisters may spend a day, eating box lunches en route. Energetic, the Little Sisters used to feel that it was wrong to make use of such labor-savers; only in the past decade have they permitted elevators, electric lights, electric washers and cleaners to be installed in their big New York homes.

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