The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph was officially born in 1650 in France, in Puy-en-Velay from the meeting of the Jesuit Father Jean-Pierre Medaille project with the desire of six young women to live a radical Christian life in the midst of the world and not in seclusion, as it used to be done at the time. Father Medaille was a "missionary" and during his preaching in the French countryside he saw how miserable the situation of the population was, torn apart by the struggles between nobility and the monarchy, after struggling out of the religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots. We needed to take care of the sick and look after orphaned children, but also to bring peace and comfort to exacerbated hearts.


According to the "small design" that Father Medaille carried in his heart, the Sisters had to become "semi" generators of communion, through a humble and simple service addressed to all and in the first place to the weakest.


The strength and the model for their life of dedication would have found it in the Eucharist, "bread broken for the salvation of the world". They would have lived in small communities, placed in hospitals or orphanages, trying to recreate the atmosphere of the Holy Family and serving others with the simple but generous and concrete love of St. Joseph.


This new way of living religious life in the midst of people responded so much to the spiritual needs of the time that very small communities of nuns arose throughout France, autonomous from each other in order to be more flexible. The 1789 Revolution seemed to halt this momentum: the nuns were dispersed, arrested, some guillotined. But the "small drawing" refused, thanks to Mother Saint Jean Fontbonne, who had escaped the gallows on the day of the fall of Robespierre, who gathered in Lyon again around him, wishing to relive Father Medaille's project and soon they swarmed throughout the world.