Live Mission today with Pauline

Pauline and Mission : a bit of history

For the Church in France the beginning of the 19th century was a period of reconstruction after revolutionary upheaval. From her years of childhood Pauline, together with her brother Philéas, nurtured dreams of mission. When her brother entered the seminary and told her about the material difficulties of the missions, Pauline enthusiastically sprung into action and launched initiatives to collect money. But nothing really took shape until there was a famous game of cards one evening in 1819.

Then it struck Pauline that each person could easily find ten people among their acquaintances who could each give one penny, five centimes, every week for the missions. What followed was a great pyramid organised in groups of 10, 100, even 1,000. Each leader of ten would receive the gifts of each member of their group, each leader of one hundred would receive the gifts gathered by the ten leaders of groups of ten, and so they would finish with having a strong common fund. Pauline put this idea to her spiritual counsellor, Fr. Würtz, who some years earlier had played an important part in her conversion. He answered :

“Pauline, you are too stupid to have thought up this scheme… Obviously it has come direct from God ! So I not only allow you to go ahead, I absolutely challenge you to put it into action”.

And so was born what was straightaway called “the Propagation of the Faith”. The principle is very simple : one person collects the offerings of ten people, each one of whom collects the offerings of ten other people, and so on. The collection goes on, hand to hand, every week. Very quickly thousands of people were convinced that this was a dream solution for supporting the missions and the organisation was officially founded on the 3^rd May 1822.

Pauline’s zeal spreads like wildfire…

The members of the enterprise would meet for a moment of prayer and exchange. The Annals of the Propagation of the Faith saw the day when they were able to gather news of missionaries in the whole world. The Annals were hugely successful and became the most widespread review of the 19th century. 250,000 copies were published in 1880 in France, and it was also translated into ten languages, with 400,000 copies published.

The work of the Propagation of the Faith, created by Pauline,  obviously then went out of her hands and took on an international dimension, but in the letters of missionaries Pauline is regularly called “Mother of the Missions”. She invented the first social missionary network, which you can join today !