Jesus Caritas

The Tubet 1940

Le Tubet is a big old house near a freight train railway line on the outskirts of Aix en Provence. It is on a hill overlooking the main motorway going to Marseille. Behind there is a pine grove where several of the Little sisters and their families are buried and from where Van Gogh painted the amazing mountain of St Victoire which changes colour and shape at every hour and every day of the week!

Little sister Magdeleine received this house as a Christmas present in 1940, one year after she had founded the Little sisters of Jesus in Touggourt, Algeria. It was a real miracle as at that time she had nowhere to house her little community. Generations of Little sisters have stayed there who consider it to be their ‘family house’.

Aix-en Provence open market

Behind the house there is a big field which for many years the Little sisters have cultivated, growing vegetables and flowers which they sell at the local market. There are outhouses too where at various times there have been cows, pigs and chickens.

Home for the Little Sisters Parents,

A second house was built later on the same site to welcome our elderly parents. For Little sister Magdeleine our families have always had a place close to her heart. A few Little Sisters also live there who are either sick or elderly and they mingle with the other residents.

A group of novices

There is also often a noviciate and especially in the summer young or not so young women are welcomed to pray and reflect on what God may be calling them to live.

Little sisters come from all over the world, individually or in groups, either before final vows or after a long time lived in small communities to renew their ties with the world-wide family and its history.

The chapel is the centre of the house. The tabernacle in the form of a tent is a reminder of the nomadic beginnings of the Little sisters and of the first friends.

Tubet Chapel

The Little Sisters will strive with all heir strength to foster within themselves and around them a more respectful, more all-inclusive love. Only such love is capable of one day uniting all people as brothers and sisters in Christ.

The fruitfulness of their effort will depend on this: that irrespective of their backgrounds, cultures, temperaments or ages, all Little sisters may be friends in the unity of the same love. It will be their firm conviction that living together as a community is of itself a mission and a sign of the kingdom of God.

Only then, at the heart of a world tragically scarred by mutual hatred, may they be a sign of the joy and hope Jesus came to bring. - Constitutions