Jeanne Bigard
History
The Society of St. Peter the Apostle began in France (1988) following the suggestion of Bishop Cousin, the Apostolic Vicar of Nagasaki, Japan. Bishop Cousin, a missionary bishop, wanted to train indigenous priests who could proclaim the gospel and make the Church grow among their own people. For this, he needed to build and support seminaries in the “ mission lands”. To carry out this project, Bishop Cousin turned to Jeanne Bigard and her mother Stephanie, a well-off family from Normandy.
When her father died, Jeanne sold all her sessions and earmarked them for the missions. She withdrew with her mother into a small, two-room apartment and dedicated herself entirely to organizing prayers and collecting funds for building Bishop Cousin’s Japanese seminary. Her intense correspondence by letter with many missionaries present in different countries, led her to the desire to get other groups of people involved in order to find economic and spiritual support for other missionary projects.
It was from the organization of these groups of Catholic laypersons that an Association was born between 1889 and 1896, that would later become the Society of St. Peter the Apostle. In 1894, Jeanne Bigard printed its first Manifesto addressed to all Christians to encourage this aid to the development of the Catholic Missions. In 1896, the Society’s Board of Directors met for the first time and the first propaganda pamphlet was printed.
The Society was founded officially in 1889 in the city of Caen in France. Its main offices were initially transferred to Paris in 1901, then to Fribourg in Switzerland, and since 1920 they have been in Rome.
With the Encyclical Letter Ad Extrema Orientis, Pope Leo XIII recommended the Society to the whole Church , on May 3, 1922, Pius XI declared the Society of St. Peter the Apostle “Pontifical” together with the two preceding ones (Propagation of the Faith and Missionary Childhood)
Our Mission
The Society of St. Peter the Apostle promotes awareness in the Christian communities regarding the need to develop the local clergy and consecrated life in the recently founded missionary churches. It animates and coordinates missionary collaboration in all the local churches through offering of prayers, sacrifices and money to support the formation of the future priests, men and women, religious of the young churches, and the necessary preparation of their formators.
It collects and distributes financial aid to support the seminaries and formation houses of the young men and women religious in collaboration with the local Christian communities and under the guidance of the pastors.
The Society of St. Peter the Apostle’s economic collaboration is carried out through the Ordinary Subsidies for the support of the seminarians and the men and women novices; the Extraordinary Subsidies for building new seminaries and for the self-financing projects of the already existing once; Scholarships and “Holy Mass Intentions” to support the formators and the programs of study.
