Feast day: August 19
St. John Eudes
A French priest who preached missions across the countryside, founded a congregation to train good priests and a refuge for women leaving prostitution, and spread devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
John Eudes was a French priest of the seventeenth century, born in Normandy in 1601, a leading figure of the great flowering of French spirituality in that age. After studies with the Jesuits he joined the Oratory and became, for some twenty years, a celebrated missionary preacher, criss-crossing France to give parish missions and labouring heroically among the sick during outbreaks of plague.
Convinced that the renewal of the Church depended above all on the holiness of its priests, in 1643 he left the Oratory to found a new community, the Congregation of Jesus and Mary — the 'Eudists' — dedicated to the training of priests in seminaries and to preaching missions. He also founded the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity to help women seeking to leave lives of prostitution.
His most lasting legacy lies in devotion. Long before the great revelations to St. Margaret Mary, John Eudes was promoting public devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, composing the first liturgical texts — Masses and Offices — in their honour and securing feasts for them. The Church calls him the 'father, doctor, and apostle' of that devotion.
He died at Caen in 1680. Canonized in 1925, he is remembered as a tireless missionary, a reformer of the priesthood, and a pioneer of devotion to the Sacred Heart.
He composed the first liturgical texts honoring the Sacred Heart, decades before the famous visions at Paray-le-Monial made the devotion universal.
Image: Unidentified painter (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/05596a.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.