Saint Anne-Marie Javouhey

Anne-Marie Javouhey, SJC (November 10, 1779 – July 15, 1851) was a French nun who founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny. She is venerated in the Roman Catholic Church. She is known as the Liberator of the Slaves in the New World, and as the mother of the town of Mana, French Guiana. She was born in the commune of Chamblanc, the fifth of ten children of a local wealthy farm couple, Balthazar and Claudine Javouhey. Through her teen years, she helped to hide and care for a number of priests persecuted by the French Revolution, including keeping watch for them as they said Mass. She made a private vow when she was nineteen years old, but was not able to become a nun because the revolutionary government had closed convents and churches. In 1800, she joined the Daughters of Charity at Besançon. In 1800, she is reported to have had a vision of Teresa of Avila entrusting children of different races to her. She did not understand its meaning at the time. Javouhey did not remain at the convent. In 1801, she started a school for poor children near Chamblanc. Given the poverty of the conditions, it was not particularly successful. She then entered a Trappistine Convent, and having completed the novitiate, once again returned home. Javouhey was joined by three of her sisters, and together they opened a school and an orphanage. Their father provided some financial assistance. She founded the Sisters of St. Joseph at Cabillon in 1805 to educate children and to help reduce the miseries which arose out of the French Revolution. In early stages in order to get children to attend the school, she resorted to playing football with the locals and requested them to attend school to play more football. She received permission from the government to use a former seminary which had become national property and there educated young girls and trained them for work. In 1810, the building became a prison for Spanish prisoners of war. The sisters took up nursing in the prison hospital.