This paper examines the early ministry of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, a congregation of nursing sisters founded in Paris in 1865. Unlike most women’s nursing congregations, the Little Sisters did not establish hospitals or care institutions. Instead, they cared for the sick poor in their own homes. In a time of working-class alienation from a Church increasingly perceived as aligned with industrial elites, the Sisters' intimate, domestic ministry functioned as a visible sign of the Church’s commitment to the urban poor.
I argue that the early ministry of the Little Sisters exposes a theological tension within emerging Catholic social thought: the effort to alleviate the material suffering of the poor while simultaneously believing suffering is redemptive. By tracing how the Sisters navigated this paradox, this paper also challenges cleric-centered narratives of social Catholicism and recovers women religious as significant contributors to its formation.