Pauline-Marie Jaricot

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Pauline-Marie Jaricot (born at Lyon, 22 July 1799; died there, 9 January 1862) was a French nun, the foundress of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith and the Association of the Living Rosary.

[edit] Life

At the age of seventeen she began to lead a life of abnegation, and on Christmas Day, 1816, took a vow of perpetual virginity. She established a union of prayer among pious servant girls, the members of which were known as the "Réparatrices du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus-Christ".

During an extended visit to her married sister at Saint-Vallier, Drôme, she reformed lives of the numerous girls employed by her brother-in-law. It was among them and the "Réparatrices" that she first solicited offerings for the foreign missions.

Her systematic organization of such collections dates back to 1819 when she asked each of her intimate friends to act as a promoter by finding ten associates willing to contribute one cent of a week to the propagation of the Catholic faith. One out of every ten promoters gathered the collections of their fellow-promoters; through a logical extention of this system, all the offerings were ultimately remitted to one central treasurer.

The Society for the Propagation of Faith at its official foundation (3 May, 1822) adopted this method, over opposition. In 1826 she founded the Association of the Living Rosary. The fifteen decades of the Rosary were divided among fifteen associates, each of whom had to recite daily only one determined decade. A second object of the new foundation was the spread of good books and articles of piety.

An undertaking of Pauline's in the interest of social reform involved her in considerable financial difficulties and ended in failure.