Our Founders

Our Founders

Etienne Pernet Etienne Pernet was born in 1824 in a small village in Franche-Comte, into a humble christian family. He began his studies at the seminary and then went to Paris. He used to go every day to the church of Notre Dame des Victoires, trying to learn what God wanted of him. He met Father d'Alzon who had just founded a new congregation: the Augustinians of the Assumption. Etienne Pernet entered their novitiate and, at Christmas 1850, became one of their first religious. He then began teaching children from well-to-do families in Nimes while at the same time looking after a club for about 200 working-class boys. He used to visit their families and discovered there a misery he hardly knew existed. From that time, Etienne Pernet carried a painful question within himself: what could be done in the face of such misery? He went all over the poorest districts and visited the sick. There, for a long time, he sought some sort of solution to these difficult situations. Antoinette Fage

Antoinette Fage was born in Paris in 1824. She grew up among the Paris working-class, her mother a seamstress. Orphaned at the age of 13, she was taken in and cared for by neighbors. She started work in a sewing workshop. Antoinette did not receive a Christian education, but she used to listen to the word of God in the churches. God spoke to her heart. Around the age of 18, she discovered the strength of a living faith. She took part in works of charity and was greatly concerned about the extreme poverty she saw around her. In 1861, when she was 37 years old, she agreed to run an orphanage for young girls and joined the Dominican Third Order. "Poverty does not frighten me. I am not afraid that Providence will fail us."