History of SPOF

 

There is a mission saying:  “No one is ever too poor to give, and no one is ever too rich to receive.”  That was the thinking of the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith – a young woman from Lyons, France, in the early 1800’s named Pauline Jaricot.  Today she is known as Venerable Pauline Jaricot as her cause for canonization is being studied.  Her brother, Phileas, was a missionary priest in China, and she fell in love with the stories coming from the missions.  Pauline said her heart was made for the whole world!  She couldn’t go to the missions but she felt call by the Lord to make a difference in the Catholic Church’s worldwide missionary work. 

     Her plan to support missionaries was to gather small groups of people in “circles of ten” – mostly workers in her family’s silk factory.  She asked each member of the group to offer daily prayer and a weekly sacrifice of a sous (the equivalent of a penny at that time) for the Church’s worldwide missionary work.  Like the story of the mustard seed, members of the group would go out and form a new “circle of ten” and it grew to 50, then 100, then 1,000 and tens of thousands until it is what it is today.  Pauline insisted that her efforts be directed to all the Church’s missions – that it be universal.  From Pauline’s vision came the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. 
 
     Her first appreciable collection of $4,000 was divided three ways for the missions in China, Louisiana and Kentucky.  America was considered mission territory at this time. 
 
      In Pauline’s vision for the missions there were two lamps - one had no oil, the other was overflowing with oil.  In her dream, the full lamp was filling up the empty one, making it fit once again for use.

• The empty lamp signified the faith in her native France – still reeling from the turbulence of the French Revolution.
• The full lamp was the great faith of Catholics in the Missions – especially the New World
• By aiding the faith of the young new country in the US, she knew that seeds planted would grow and bear much fruit

Three aspects of Pauline’s life we can model in our own lives
1.  Commitment to mission every day - For Pauline, mission was not reserved for               certain moments, but every day and the “Circles of 10” prayed every day.
2.  A vision of the whole world – help offered to the missions should be universal
3.  Live in love – Pauline always expressed her desire to “love without measure, without          end.”  Love should extend beyond ourselves, to those faraway places, where nobody is
      watching, where the vulnerable are forgotten, and the poor are abandoned.
 
Pauline is referred to as “The Match that Lit the Fire” and the 150^th anniversary of her death was celebrated on January 9, 2012.