Blessed Jean-Martin Moye

Jean-Martin Moye (written later in his life as Moÿe) was a French Catholic priest who served as a missionary in China and was the founder of the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence. He also organized the first expression of consecrated life among the women of China. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1954. Moye was born on 27 January 1730 in the village of Cutting, then located within the Bailiwick of Dieuze, within the autonomous Duchy of Lorriane, a part of the Holy Roman Empire, now in the French Department of Moselle. He was the sixth of the thirteen children of Jean Moye and Anne Catharine Demange, part of a long-established and prosperous farming family of the region. The fervent Catholic faith of the family can be seen in the fact that, apart from Jean-Martin, a younger brother also became a priest, as well as five of his first cousins, and later two of his nephews. Moye had an uneventful childhood, growing up on his family's extensive holdings. He received his basic education from his older brother, Jean-Jacques, a seminarian, who taught him until his untimely death in 1744 at the age of 24. Moye completed his education at the College of Pont-à-Mousson, following which he studied philosophy at the Jesuit College of Strasbourg. In the fall of 1751 he then entered the local diocesan Seminary of Saint-Simon in Metz, the same one at which his brother had studied. There one of his professors included Canon François Thiébaut, a noted Biblical scholar of the era, who would later serve as the representative of the local clergy to the Estates General. Moye was ordained a priest on 9 March 1754 by Louis-Joseph de Montmorency-Laval, the Bishop of Metz. Upon his ordination, he was granted a benefice by King Stanislas Leszczynski, the last Duke of Lorraine, of the income generated from the Chapel of St. Andrew in the cemetery of Dieuze.