ORIGIN of ST. PAUL OF CHARTRES
In the small village of Levesville-la-Chenard in the diocese of Chartres, France, Father Louis Chauvet, the
parish priest, founded the Daughters of the School in 1696, with the help of Mademoiselle Marie Anne de Tilly,
who trained the first members: Mère Marie Micheau and Mère Barbe Foucault, to teach children and to care for the
sick in their homes. The growing institution was entrusted in 1708 to Bishop Paul Godet des Marais of Chartres ,
who gave it his name. The death of the founder on June 21, 1710 did not impede the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres
from spreading to different corners of the globe, to all the continents except Antarctica.
Invited to the Philippines by Bishop Frederick Z. Rooker for the “protection of the faith”, the Sisters of St. Paul were the first of the European congregations to come to the Philippines at the onset of the American Regime. They arrived on 29 October 1904 in Dumaguete, Negros Oriental. Instituto de San Pablo became the first of more than a hundred mission houses they would open in their first 100 years in the Philippines.
Today, more than 500 Filipino Sisters of St. Paul run 56 mission houses in the country with 36 schools, 12 health care facilities, 9 pastoral centers and 9 houses under the Provincialate. Thirty-six of these houses are in Luzon, 8 in the Visayas and 12 in Mindanao. Several Sisters serve the greater church in various capacities as managers and organizers of Church programs. They serve at the Pontifical Commission Cor Unum at the Vatican. Under the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines, they assist at the National Secretariat for Social Action, Family Life Ministry, Ministry among Migrant Workers, religious education and catechetics, formation of campus ministers and catechists, advocacy work for indigenous groups,
and communication media. With the Association of Major Religious, they look to the promotion of women, street children and other marginalized groups. Sixty-seven Filipino St. Paul Sisters serve in fourteen mission countries which include Central Africa, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, France, England, Ireland, Italy, Thailand, Hongkong, the United States, Indonesia, East Timor, and Israel.
Teachers, healers, pastoral workers, missionaries, servants of the Church, this is the Philippine Province of the Congregation today.
