The Daughters of Charity

Louise de Marillac, a Parisian widow, had worked with the Ladies of Charity, wealthy women who helped the poor. Vincent de Paul had founded the Congregation of the Mission in 1625, and four years later he asked her to help him with the Confraternities of Charity in the parishes of France.

In 1633 the two brought together in Paris a group of twelve young women of peasant background, unlike the well-born members of most religious communities. At the time no community of women in France worked outside the walls of a cloister, and Vincent wanted a company that could go anywhere. The Daughters took simple vows, renewed every year, adding a vow of service of the poor to poverty, chastity and obedience. As Vincent put it, their cell was a rented room, their chapel the parish church and their cloister the streets of the city.

Their work took them to the sick in their own homes and in hospitals, to wounded soldiers on the battlefield and to prisoners condemned to the galleys. They set up soup kitchens, organized community hospitals, founded schools and homes for orphans, offered job training and worked to improve conditions in prisons.

Louise died on 15 March 1660, a few months before Vincent. She was canonized in 1934, and in 1960 Pope John XXIII named her patron of social workers. In the 19th century a community of sisters founded in the United States by Elizabeth Ann Seton joined the Daughters of Charity, whose motherhouse remains in Paris. The order now has more than 13,000 members in more than 96 countries.