Saint Joan Antidea Thouret

Jeanne-Antide Thouret, SCSJA (27 November 1765 - 24 August 1826; also called Joan Antide Thouret and Jane Antide) was a French Catholic nun who founded a branch of the Sisters of Charity. Thouret was born in Sancey, in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, on November 27, 1765, the fifth child of a poor and "deeply Christian family". She was baptized the day she was born and was named after her godmother. She had three older brothers. Thouret "felt a strong attraction to the stricter religious life and at the same time to the service of the poor" at a young age. Her mother died when she was sixteen years old; she cared for her family and siblings, despite conflict with her aunt who disagreed with her father's decision to allow her to care for her siblings. When she was 22, against the wishes of her family who wanted her to marry, Thouret entered the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul to serve the poor and work in hospitals, first in Langres and then in Paris. While a postulant, she had what she described as her first "encounter" with St. Vincent de Paul, establishing what she considered the close father-daughter relationship with him that lasted her whole life. On August 15, 1797, Thouret founded a school for poor girls in Besançon and on April 11, 1799, founded the Sisters of Charity and with two young women, founded a soup kitchen for the poor and a free school for girls, also in Besançon. During the French Revolution, when religious communities were suppressed and many priests and religious were killed, she was ordered to return to her family's home, but she refused and was badly beaten when she tried to escape the authorities. Thouret returned to Sancy in 1797, where she founded a small school for girls and worked with the sick until she had to flee to Switzerland, Germany, and then back to Switzerland in 1799, where she opened a school, hospital, and a congregation called the Institute of the Daughters of St.