Founders Of The Society of St Peter The Apostle
The Beginning
In 1889 a desperate Bishop of Nagasaki in Japan wrote to two French women, Mme Stephanie Bigard and her daughter, Jeanne: ‘Might I interest you a little in my seminary? At the moment it holds more than fifty students. Despite all our economies, even these fifty mouths are a burden on our meagre resources. At the beginning of last year, we had to announce that we could only admit twelve new students, two from each district. Well, from one district alone fifteen presented themselves. We had to invent a thousand pretexts for sending them back to their families - boys who would have made excellent priests.’
The Bigard Family
The Bigard family were from good backgrounds and often involved with high society. Charles did not share his wife Stephanie’s faith but supported her wish to attend daily Mass. They had two children, René and Jeanne. Tragedy struck the Bigard family when Charles committed suicide at the age of 57 in 1878, and her son René, Jeanne’s elder brother, was killed when a paraffin lamp exploded in his face.
Stephanie and Jeanne were distraught and threw themselves into a life of prayer and sacrifice for the salvation of husband and brother, both of whom had lost their faith, dedicating themselves to working for the missions.
The Birth of the Society
Some years before, after Charles Bigard’s death, a French missionary whom they had befriended asked for help in building a church at Kyoto in Japan. Stephanie and Jeanne set to work with resolve to raise the money. In the end, to ensure the completion of the building, Jeanne sold her dowry along with a plot of land and a farm. Her sacrifice was great - with her dowry gone, she could no longer look forward to marriage.
So when the Bishop of Nagasaki needed help maintaining his seminarians, it was not surprising that he turned to Stephanie and Jeanne. They again agreed to help, appealed to friends, and the Society of St Peter the Apostle was born.
Almost immediately they were robbed. To avoid drawing attention to themselves and the money they collected, they moved into a small and decrepit house in a poor area of Caen, a move which was to adversely affect their health.
Legal Recognition
Despite suspicion and hostility from bishops and clergy alike, the work of the Society grew until within four years it attracted the notice of Pope Leo XIII, who was greatly interested in promoting the growth of a local clergy in the Missions.
Armed with the Pope’s blessing, the two women travelled throughout France to promote the work of the Society and eventually established a central office in Paris. The anti-clerical government refused the Society legal recognition, so within a year they moved to Switzerland.
Another Tragedy
The work and worry took their toll and in 1903 Stephanie died, at the age of 69, and tragedy struck again. Jeanne became depressed and, realising that she now could no longer give the Society the support it required, she resigned. Two years later, after a series of severe delirious fits, she was admitted to a mental asylum where she died in obscurity nearly 28 years later on 28 April 1934, at the age of 75.
Before her mental collapse, Jeanne Bigard wrote, ‘Because I am a faulty instrument, a rusty and bent tool, God chose me to begin the Society.’ She could not then have foreseen where her vision would lead.
The Papal Patronage
In 1922, Pope Pius XI placed the Society under papal patronage and gave it the task of supporting every seminary in the missionary world.
Mission dioceses are now called young churches. It is within these young churches that the Church is now most active and growing. Many new mission dioceses have been established in recent years.
The Society Today
Most of the young churches however are in developing countries. They have the faith, but often material poverty and hardship means that they are not able to train the many young men and women who wish to become priests and religious at the service of God and their communities.
Jeanne Bigard’s Society of St Peter the Apostle is now responsible for financing the training of all these young people and for building their seminaries and novitiates. An impossible task without adequate funding, and over a hundred years after the Bishop of Nagasaki wrote his letter to the Bigard’s, young men and women are still being turned away because the money is just not available for their training.
The Society worldwide now supports over 30,000 major seminarians and 10,000 religious. The SPA continues to bring Christian missionaries throughout the world in communion with each other and tries to ensure that good vocations are not turned away through lack of financial resources. The SPA also enables us to take up our duty as missionaries and followers of Christ to make both spiritual and financial sacrifices, continuing the work begun by a young woman over 100 years ago.