Ah, this one's tangled up in All Things Major. Let's start by talking about the saint herself.
Jeanne Jugan's dad died when she was four. Her mom farmed to feed the kids, and tried to teach them to live Christian lives. It wasn't easy because the French Revolution had put an anti-Church government in place, but she did the best she could.
Jeanne went to work for a wealthy woman (there were some, well after Napoleon's defeat when prosperity finally came back). Together, they visited the poor, the sick, the elderly, the shut-ins, and all the other least of God's children. Jeanne understood that she didn't have to be rich to comfort the needy, so she took the veil, became a nun, and eventually founded the Little Sisters of the Poor. At the website linked there, you can find a slide show with sayings from Saint Jeanne.
Little Sisters of the Poor. It rings a bell, doesn't it? Perhaps you remember last year when Dr. Gordon Gee, President of the Ohio State University, suggested that TCU and Boise State did not deserve to be in BCS games as much as his Buckeyes did. Regarding the relative strength of competition of their schedules, he said "We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor."
It played big, but not well. Dr. Gee started eating crow immediately and only just finished last week when he spent the day at a home they operate in northwest Ohio. You can read all about his faux-pas and penance here. Envy is a deadly sin, I know, but it is hard not to succumb when I read that the nuns gave Dr. Gee a bow tie with the logo of the Little Sisters of the Poor printed on it. I wonder if TCU and Boise State gave him anything.
August 29 also one of the feasts of Saint John the Baptist. In Poirot: Appointment with Death, Tim Curry plays a daffy archeologist who is digging in Syria for the head of John the Baptist. That's a silly notion, of course, since we know the skull was cracked up into three parts and is safely stowed in Amiens, Istanbul, and Rome.
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