Boston CSJ Heritage Video Series – October 2-15, 2019

Each year, on October 2 and October 15 we celebrate two significant events in our CSJ history. October 2, 1873 is the day when the first four Sisters of St. Joseph arrived in Boston. October 15, 1650, more than two centuries earlier, marks the official founding of the Sisters of St. Joseph by six sisters in Le Puy, France. To mark these anniversaries, we have developed brief videos in which Sisters Betsy Conway, Jeanmarie Gribaudo, and Pat Andrews speak about what impels them now continue the tradition of our mission of unifying love and share it with others.

Beginnings in Le Puy, France

If every age has its own paradoxes, seventeenth century France in which we had our beginnings was certainly no exception. On the one hand, it was an age of hierarchy and order, a period dominated by classical harmony and external propriety. On the other hand, this century had seen thirty years of war (1618 – 1648) which left in its wake a population reduced to a struggle for existence. Widows and orphans, especially, suffered from famine, disease, and poverty.

In the midst of this misery, the Spirit brought together the Jesuit missionary, Jean Pierre Médaille, and a group of women who shared a compassion for their neighbors and a conviction that their own salvation, service to those in need, and proclaiming the glory of God were one and the same.  This Little Design began quietly in small towns of south central France. It spread unobtrusively for 150 years and after the French Revolution it blossomed, grew, and changed in ways previously undreamed of. ¹ As Médaille encouraged, they went about this work doing anything of which a woman is capable. Read more on our website at https://www.csjboston.org/who-we-are/our-mission-history/

 ¹Based on Mary M. McGlone, CSJ, Anything of Which a Woman Is Capable, © 2017, U.S. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph