Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort
Missionary and Founder of Orders (1673–1716)
Tireless preacher of the Mother of God in the midst of many contradictions.Feast day is April 28th.
Louis-Marie Grignion de La Bacheleraie was born in Montfort-la-Cane, then in the diocese of Saint-Malo, now in the diocese of Rennes, on January 31, 1673. In the spirit of religion and humility, he later abandoned the name of his family, taking the name of the place of his birth and baptism. His early education was pious and strong; he completed it with the Jesuits of Rennes, where he acquired the reputation of a Saint Louis de Gonzague.
Providence then led him to Paris, to study in various houses run by the Sulpicians, and at Saint-Sulpice itself. In this seminary, where he shone by his intelligence and deep piety, God's views of him were not sufficiently understood. God allowed him to do so in order to form him in the love of the Cross, of which he was to be a passionate apostle. It was at the school of Saint-Sulpice, however, that he drew his marvellous love of Mary and prepared himself to become Her Apostle and Teacher.
As a young priest, he was first chaplain at the hospital in Poitiers, where he carried out a reform that was as prompt as it was astonishing. Then tossed about for some time by the persecutions caused by the Jansenists, he went to Rome in order to offer himself to the Pope for foreign missions, and he received from the Supreme Pontiff the order to work for the evangelization of France.
From then on, for ten years, he went from mission to mission, in several dioceses of the West, which he stirred and transformed by his powerful word, by the flame of his zeal and by his miracles. He nourished his spiritual life in continual prayer and in prolonged retreats, and was the object of frequent visits by the Blessed Virgin. His popular hymns complete the astonishing fruits of his preaching; he plants the Cross everywhere; he sowed devotion to the Rosary everywhere: he providentially prepared the peoples of the West for their heroic resistance to the destructive tide of the Revolution, which was to arise in less than a century.
After sixteen years of apostolate, he died in the middle of preaching, at Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre (Vendée), at the age of forty-three, leaving, to continue his work, a Society of missionaries, the Sisters of Wisdom, and some Brothers for the Schools, known everywhere today as the Brothers of Saint-Gabriel. He is one of the greatest saints of modern times, and the promoter of the prodigious development of devotion to the Blessed Virgin in our time.
Abbé L. Jaud, Vie des Saints pour tous les jours de l'année, Tours, Mame, 1950
Long version (La Bonne Presse)
Blessed Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort was one of those stars whom God sends from time to time on the stage of the world; he had thrown light on the decline, all darkened by Jansenism, of what is called the age of Louis XIV; then its brilliance seemed to fade. To XXTh century, his fame only increased, his doctrine spread more and more, either by his works, or by those which he inspired; at the same time his life and examples, which are becoming more and more well known, continue his lessons of contempt for the world and love for Jesus on the cross.
Early education. – Saint-Sulpice.
Louis Grignion was born on January 31, 1673, at Montfort-la-Cane, now Montfort-sur-Meu, a small town in the diocese of Rennes, and formerly in the diocese of Saint-Malo, to Jean-Baptiste Grignion, sieur de La Bacheleraie, Breton gentleman, lawyer, and Jeanne Robert de La Vizeule. To the name of Louis, which he received at baptism, the servant of God added that of Mary at her confirmation. On entering, destitute of everything, into the ecclesiastical state, he willingly hid his name under that of Montfort, the place of his baptism, and it was under this latter name that he became famous, with a celebrity made up of contradictions on the one hand, and the reputation of holiness on the other.
He was one of the eldest of nine and perhaps eleven children; among them he counted three religious sisters and a Dominican friar; he himself was a member of the Third Order of St. Dominic. M. Grignion, in spite of his modest fortune, sent him, in 1685, to study at Rennes in a flourishing college, run by the Jesuits. Louis was noted for his devotion to the Blessed Virgin, his great purity and his love for the poor.
He was eighteen years old and had just finished his philosophy, when God made him hear a mysterious call to the priesthood. He was attracted to Paris by the generosity of a benefactress who wanted him to attend the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice; In a spirit of poverty he made the journey on foot, and arrived in rags; he was placed, not at Saint-Sulpice, but in a neighbouring house for poor ecclesiastics.
He was able to continue his studies at the Sorbonne only at the cost of hard sacrifices, agreeing to watch over the dead in the parish of Saint-Sulpice. Of the hours of night which he thus spent three or four times a week, he employed the first four in prayer on his knees, two others in spiritual reading, two in sleep, and the rest in the study of theology. He then entered another house of poor clerics, called the Robertins. Louis Grignion exercised fearful mortifications upon him: bloody disciplines, iron chains, cilices, everything was done to appease his thirst for sacrifice.
These exaggerated austerities soon exhausted his robust, but as yet incompletely formed, nature. At the age of twenty he fell ill and had to be taken to the Hôtel-Dieu, where he edified everyone.
About the same time he found himself free from immediate need thanks to the benefit of two foundations; he was then admitted to the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, but his superiors decided, in view of his limited resources, to no longer send him to the Sorbonne. Appointed librarian of the Seminary, he spent his holidays acquiring a profound knowledge of Sacred Scripture, the Fathers and the Doctors, which would later nourish his missionary sermons. At this time, too, he began to compose hymns; He later owes them part of his success as a reaper of souls.
However, the peculiarities of his life and his mortifications more than once kept the minds of his superiors in suspense; but the severest trials, the public humiliations which they inflicted upon him, never found fault with his humility, nor with his obedience. Living by faith, Montfort judged all things by this measure. Hence his ways of speaking or acting, which are humanly inexplicable; hence innumerable persecutions and reproaches.
Yet the hostility to which he was the object all his life is explained much less by his singularities than by his ardent struggle against the Jansenist doctrines, which then poisoned a large part of the Church of France, against the scandals of morals, as frequent at that time as at ours, and against all abuses.
The former favourite of Louis XIV., Madame de Montespan, who had been excluded from Versailles since 1691 and who expiated her former scandalous life by charity, had a great esteem for the servant of God; she took charge of three of her sisters, placing one in a convent in Paris, the house of St. Joseph, and the other two in the abbey of Fontevrault, in the diocese of Angers, which was headed by Gabrielle de Rochechouart, Madame de Montespan's own sister.
He was sent to Nantes, then to Poitiers.
Montfort was raised to the priesthood on 5 June 1700 and celebrated his first mass eight days later in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in the church of Saint-Sulpice. He was then twenty-seven years old. Even before he became a priest, the holy young man had repeatedly expressed his desire to go to distant missions. God had other plans for him. His superiors advised him to go to Nantes, where a society of priests was dedicated to the missions, in the parishes of Brittany. M. Lévêque, the superior of this house, was one of the first disciples of M. Olier.
However, the little society of Nantes was not nearly as holy as its superior. Moreover, at that time, all the high clergy and all the Orders of the city, with the exception of the Jesuits, who, there as elsewhere, never abandoned it, and also of the Capuchins, were inclined to Jansenism. This remark determined him to follow another course; he left Nantes in April 1701 and left for Fontevrault, where one of his sisters was to take the habit. But, travelling on foot, he arrived... the day after the ceremony. Madame de Montespan urged him to go to Monsignor Girard, Bishop of Poitiers, who had been tutor to her children; the latter was at Niort, and the holy priest had to wait four days for him. He employed this time in a retreat and in caring for the sick at the general hospital. They were so touched by his piety and the poverty of his clothes, that they subscribed to give him alms, and begged the bishop to give him to them as chaplains.
From Poitiers he returned to Nantes and had the consolation of giving a mission alone at Grandchamp, where he successfully applied his method of preaching and hymns; Father de Montfort also preached at Pellerin and in various parishes in the vicinity.
At the hospital in Poitiers. – Foundation test.
On 25 Aug. 1701 a letter from Bishop Girard appointed him chaplain of the hospital at Poitiers. He accepted, in spite of the little attraction he felt for a life that was too quiet, feeling called to the missions of the countryside; He insisted on carrying out his duties free of charge and receiving only food from the poor.
The hospices were then, in Poitiers as almost everywhere, governed by widows or pious young girls who considered these functions rather as a position than as a post of devotion. It was by seeing at close quarters the vice of this secular administration of charity, that the holy chaplain conceived the design of founding an association based on the spirit of sacrifice and composed of members bound by the vows of religion.
He began by trying to group the nurses together; On this side he had successes, then setbacks. Then he undertook to recruit from among the sick and the boarders themselves the elements of a pious association, a sort of outline of a true Congregation, and which he would call "Wisdom" out of devotion to the Holy Spirit; The superior of this association was the most pious of its members, a blind woman. But already the holy founder had his sights set on a valuable recruit, Marie-Louise Trichet.
In Paris and Mont Valérien.
The holy man remained ten months in the general hospital of Poitiers, where he restored good order, which had long been disturbed. But his anxieties about the vocation of his sister in Paris, who had left the house of Saint-Joseph, determined him to go to the capital in 1702. On the way, he was expelled from the Seminary of Angers by one of his former directors, who had been warned against him; in Paris, clever calumnies had alienated his protectors at Saint-Sulpice. He did, however, providentially succeed in having his sister admitted to the Benedictine Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
In spite of these contempts, if it was a question of undertaking some design reputed to be difficult or impossible, it was to his virtue that recourse was had had place. Thus it was that discord had arisen in a convent of hermits, who lived in a very austere manner on Mont-Valérien, the abbot, M. Madot, afterwards bishop of Belley, and afterwards of Chalón, begged Montfort to go thither. He did so humbly, and the religious, touched by his virtue, made mutual concessions to each other which brought peace.
Return to Poitiers. – Beginning of the Congregation of Wisdom
He returned to Poitiers and resumed his project of a Congregation of Religious Hospitallers. The first novice from outside whom he received and who, indeed, was the foundress under his direction, was the daughter of a procurator at the presidial of Poitiers, Marie-Louise Trichet. She was only seventeen years old when she had recourse to his direction in 1701. Father Grignion admitted him to daily communion, according to the ancient custom of the Church, which unfortunately had long since fallen into disuse and which Jansenism had completed. Then, on February 2, 1708, when she was nineteen years old, he had her put on a special habit, such as the Daughters of Wisdom still wear. It was a coarse grey woollen dress; A headdress and sandals without heels completed this costume, over which he threw a black cloak resembling a mourning cloak. \
"Sister Marie-Louise of Jesus" was to wait seven years with a companion, Catherine Brunet, for the hour marked by Providence for the realization of the founder's projects.
Fresh difficulties having arisen, the poor chaplain resolved to leave the hospital; abandoning himself to divine action, he again took the road to Paris, about Easter 1708, and obtained admission to the hospital of the Salpêtrière, which had 5,000 boarders; He devoted himself to it in such a brilliant manner that he was discharged.
The poor of the hospital at Poitiers were not consoled by the departure of their chaplain. On March 9, 1704, they wrote a letter in which they demanded the return of the man whom they had so well appreciated. Montfort obeyed at once. We give it 3o frank for his way; He distributes this money to the poor, and goes on a beggar's journey.
Beginning of missions.
The trials increased to such an extent that Father de Montfort resolved to abandon into the hands of God the cradle which contained his dearest hopes. He presented himself to the bishop of Poitiers, Bishop de La Poype de Vertrieu, begging him to allow him to follow his attraction to the missions. The bishop, who appreciated the apostle, readily consented.
Montfort was then thirty-one years old. Endowed with a health which his fearful austerities had not yet weakened too much, he set to work and began his preaching at Montbernage, a suburb of Poitiers, dependent on the parish of Sainte-Radegonde.
His ardent, striking, and popular words in the manner of Bridaine, the impulses of his faith, the enthusiasms of his love, the mere sight of that strange face in which the austerities of his penance were read, all in him preached God. The people flocked to hear him, and almost at every sermon the sobs of the audience answered his convinced accents. Conversions took place en masse.
But the devil was not long in hindering the work of the Apostle as best he could. A thousand trials were brought upon him. The most painful was that which came to him from the Bishop of Poitiers. This prelate, having allowed himself to be circumvented, had him notified of the prohibition to preach and the order to leave the diocese. This severe measure, of which the bishop afterwards repented, was very sensible to our apostle, but not a word of murmuring touched his lips. He was then preaching a retreat; he interrupted it and took advantage of this enforced rest to go to Rome.
Pilgrimage to Rome.
Montfort undertook this pilgrimage on foot and without money. Then, after running many dangers, he arrived at Loreto, and rested there for a fortnight, went to Rome, and obtained an audience with Clement XI, on the 6th of June, 1706. The Pope dismissed him, giving him with his blessing the title of apostolic missionary.
This paternal welcome was a great encouragement to him; he returned from Rome by way of Saumur and Mont-Saint-Michel.
New ban on preaching. – Apostolic Life.
Some time afterwards M. Grignion came to Rennes, where his father and mother lived. He preached his first mission there and then went to Montfort, his homeland, and to Dinan, where his Dominican brother lived. There he gave a mission to the soldiers of the garrison. From there he spread to the dioceses of Saint-Malo and Saint-Brieuc.
Soon suspected in his own diocese of origin, Father de Montfort returned to Nantes where he carried out several missions.
One day, on the Motte-Saint-Nicolas, he saw a considerable crowd, and, understanding that a public dance was the cause of this gathering, he unhesitatingly split the ranks of the curious and entered the midst of the dancers. They surround him and jeer at him, and one of them, in mockery, sings one of the hymns he sang in the mission. But he, taking up his rosary and raising his crucifix, said, "If there are any friends of God in this assembly, let them kneel with me." His inspired air, his acknowledged virtue, subjugated the most daring, and all, dancers and spectators, fell on their knees, recited the rosary and dispersed.
In 1709 he gave the mission at Pont-Château and in the neighbouring parishes. There he erected a famous Calvary, an artificial hill 50 feet high, at the erection of which 20,000 people laboured; this was the pretext for new accusations against him before the bishop of Nantes. On the very eve of the date fixed for the solemn inauguration—the 4th of September, 1709—he was forbidden to preach. The civil authority, for its part, was moved by the construction of a "fortress," and its demolition was ordered and partly executed. He had returned to Nantes, and, preaching being forbidden to him, occupied himself with the care of the incurable.
In the meantime, summoned by the bishops of La Rochelle and Luçon, he prepared for the struggle against the Protestant peril.
His preaching was very successful, both in the diocese of Luçon, where he first passed, and in that of La Rochelle. He preached for Easter at the Isle of Yeu, and in the spring made a journey to Nantes; He then composed a piece of writing, the. The Secret of Mary, which, further developed, would become the admirable Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin; he condensed in it, making it accessible to all, the doctrine of Father de Condren, of Mr. Olier, and of Mr. Boudon.
Foundation of a Society of Missionaries.
Despite his robust constitution, the missionary felt that his youth would not long withstand the extreme fatigues of mission life. He saw the immense good that these exercises were producing everywhere. He thought of surviving himself in sons capable of continuing this work. The bishop of La Rochelle encouraged him. The holy priest left for Paris in June 1713, in order to affiliate the congregation of his dreams to the Seminary of the Holy Spirit, founded by M. Poullart des Places. He recruited from this seminary the first elements of his future family, which he called the Society of Mary. 'On his return to Poitiers, he had the joy of meeting the two recruits of his little community of Wisdom. But the bishop of Poitiers, ill-advised, ordered him to leave the city within twenty-four hours. The humble missionary obeyed at once without complaint and set out for La Rochelle where he had to be treated in hospital for a serious and painful illness. He resumed his missionary work, got into trouble in the diocese of Saintes and returned to La Rochelle where he installed three Brothers in the "Petites Ecoles"; These religious, brothers of those who helped him in the material organization of the missions, were, in a way, the first subjects of an institute that was later to be greatly efflored, that of Saint-Gabriel, reorganized at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Father Deshayes, Superior General of the Society of Mary.
After having sent to Aunis and Saintonge, the Blessed wished to consult one of his old friends, M. Blain, then Vicar General of Rouen; Here he was again on the road: he crossed the dioceses of Nantes, Rennes and Avranches where he again encountered setbacks; in that of Coutances, preaching and confession were forbidden to him, but the prohibition was reported; In Rouen, his friend lectures him amicably on his singularity and refuses to follow him. He returned to Nantes to his dear incurables; Finally, he accepted the hospitality of friends in Rennes, but he was soon served there and returned to La Rochelle in 1715. He withdrew the two Sisters from the hospital in Poitiers and brought them to La Rochelle to take care of a girls' school; he soon left them to preach in the diocese of Luzon.
During the mission of Villiers-en-Plaine, he was seen praying with his arms crossed, and raised more than two feet above the ground. He also came to Mervent, and as his strength began to betray him, he fixed his temporary retreat there in a wild cave, at the bottom of which winds the Vendée, and which is now the object of a pilgrimage. The Blessed then went to Saint-Pompain, where he attracted to his Congregation, then composed of a few Brothers, the vicar of the parish, M. Mulot, who with M. Vatel, a recruit from the Seminary of the Holy Spirit, was one of his first disciples and became his successor, hence the name of "Mulotines" given for some time to the Missionaries.
Fr. de Montfort also persuaded 33 men of the parish to make the pilgrimage of Our Lady of the Ardillers, in Saumur, to obtain heavenly blessings on the Society of Mary. The pilgrims walked barefoot part of the way. The holy missionary made the same journey a few days later, with several Brothers.
In Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre. "His death." – Its influence.
During this pilgrimage he felt the first announcements of his approaching end. On 21 Jan. 1716 he lost his aged father, who died at the Abbaye-en-Bréteil, near Montfort. Accompanied by M. Mulot, he came to begin the mission of Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, a parish in the diocese of Poitiers, now Luçon. A few days later he was stricken with pleurisy, saw death coming with intrepidity, and on Tuesday, April 28, 1716, he gave up his beautiful soul to God.
According to his wishes, he was buried near the altar of the Blessed Virgin in the parish church. The confidence of the people has made his tomb the destination of a pilgrimage. Many miracles have been performed there.
It was here that his daughters, in 1720, and his sons, the following year, sheltered their cradle; All three congregations have grown, lived, and prospered in the shadow of this revered tomb.
The influence of the Servant of God in the dioceses and the 180 parishes he evangelized was profound and lasting. The historians of the wars of the Vendée, in going back to the causes of this gigantic struggle of the humble for the defence of religion, find the preaching of Father de Montfort: in fact, after eighty years, they had not been forgotten. If Jansenism has been defeated in these regions, if Protestantism has not made new conquests, if the populations have remained rooted in the faith, it is to the valiant missionary that they are indebted.
Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, declared Venerable on September 7, 1838, was beatified by Leo XIII on January 22, 1888.
J.-E. Drochon.
LPL Note: The article was written before the canonization of St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Monfort by Pope Pius XII on July 20, 1947. We've changed the title accordingly. See the homily and speech given by Pius XII on this occasion.
Sources consulted. – R. P. Fonteneau, Life of Blessed Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort. – Ernest Jac, Blessed Grignion de Montfort (Les Saints Collection). – Archbishop Laveille, Blessed L.-M. Grignion de Montfort (1673–1716), from unpublished documents (1908); Blessed Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort and his religious families (1916). – Abbé Pauvert, Life of the Venerable Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1876). – J.-M. Quérard, Life of Blessed Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, Founder of the Missionaries of the Company of Mary, the Daughters of Wisdom and the Brothers of the Holy Spirit. – (V.S. B. P., No. 367.)
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