August 19–St. John Eudes, Priest and Founder

Anonymous, St. John Eudes, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Priests are the backbone of parish life. A good pastor can help his parish grow in love for God and each other, building parish life. But how does one become a good priest? That was the problem that today’s saint, St. John Eudes, faced when he decided to found the Congregation of Jesus and Mary. He founded and staffed three seminaries. St. John Eudes (1601-1680) was ordained in 1625 in France and eight years later became a parish missionary, going from parish to parish to preach renewal, giving 110 missions.

Pope Benedict XVI, in a general audience during the Year of the Priest in 2009, said, “Prompted by a lucid awareness of the grave need for spiritual assistance in which souls lay because of the inadequacy of the majority of the clergy, the Saint, who was a parish priest, founded a congregation specifically dedicated to the formation of priests. He founded his first seminary in the university town of Caen, a particularly appreciated experience which he very soon extended to other dioceses. The path of holiness, which he took himself and proposed to his followers, was founded on steadfast trust in the love that God had revealed to humanity in the priestly Heart of Christ and in the maternal Heart of Mary. In those times of cruelty, of the loss of interiority, he turned to the heart to speak to the heart, a saying of the Psalms very well interpreted by St Augustine. He wanted to recall people, men and women and especially future priests, to the heart by showing them the priestly Heart of Christ and the motherly Heart of Mary. Every priest must be a witness and an apostle of this love for Christ's Heart and Mary's Heart.” We need good priests! St. John Eudes, pray for us!