Founding The congregation was founded in Paris in 1865, by
Etienne Pernet, an
Assumptionist priest, and
Marie Antoinette Fage, known in religion as "Marie de Jésus". Both had long been engaged in charitable work, Pernet while a professor in the College of the Assumption at Nîmes, and Fage as a member of the Association of Our Lady of Good Council in
Paris. They met in Paris, and Pernet placed Fage in charge of the work of nursing the sick poor which he had inaugurated. Out of this movement the sisterhood grew, Marie de Jesus being the first superior. The nursing of the sick poor was not the only purpose of the Little Sisters. They endeavoured to bring about conversions, to regularize illicit unions, to have children baptized, sent to school, and prepared for first
Communion and
Confirmation. They formed societies among their clients and enlisted the aid of laypeople of education and means to further the work of regeneration. The congregation had established houses in Italy, Spain, Belgium, England, Ireland, and the United States of America. The papal brief approving the congregation was issued in April 1897. The Congregation lived a modified monastic lifestyle, adapted from the
Augustinians of the Assumption. Up until the liturgical reforms of 1957, the congregation prayed the
Little Office of Our Lady in choir. The motherhouse was in
Grenelle, Paris. During the 1930s, Woodlands' accommodation was expanded by the construction of an adjacent building (today called
Mycenae House); the sisters left Blackheath in 1967, relocating to
Paddington. In 1947, the vicariates of England and Ireland became separate provinces. The sisters arrived in Dublin in early 1891, at the request of the chancellor of the Archdiocese, on behalf of
William Walsh, the
Archbishop of Dublin. In impoverished Dublin, much of the donations for the sisters was expended on food and clothing for the poor. In 1897, the sisters extended their efforts to
Kingstown; several trained at
St. Michael's Hospital. A house was established in Ballyfermot in 1952. In 1978 the sisters moved from Kingstown to
Ballybrack, where they continued their public health nursing and pastoral work. In 1899, six sisters established a house in Cork. Initially settling on the Lower East Side, by the 1950s they had moved to
Yorkville, caring for families on the East Side, in Harlem and in the South Bronx. In 1993 there was a split in the Italian province, part of which formed the new congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption (S.C.A.). ==Present day==