Saint John Eudes

Priest

Feast Day

August 19

Life

1601–1680

Canonized

1925

Order

Congregation of Jesus and Mary (Eudists, C.J.M.)

Born

Ri, Normandy, Kingdom of France

Saint John Eudes was born at Ri in Normandy on November 14, 1601, eldest of seven children of Isaac Eudes, a farmer of modest means. After studies with the Jesuits at Caen he entered the Oratory of France in 1623 (the Berullian Oratory founded by Cardinal Pierre de Berulle). He was ordained priest at Caen on December 20, 1625.

For the next twenty years, as an Oratorian, he was one of the most active missionary priests in Normandy, conducting popular missions, especially after the great plagues of 1627 and 1631 in which he heroically attended the sick (going so far as to live in a tent outside the city to avoid contaminating his confreres). He served also as spiritual director and writer; his Manual of Piety (1636) and his works on the Christian sanctification of life made him one of the principal disciples of the French school of spirituality founded by Cardinal de Berulle, Olier, and Saint Vincent de Paul.

Convinced of the urgent need for a renewed clergy, on March 25, 1643, John Eudes left the Oratory and at Caen founded the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, popularly called the Eudists, dedicated to the formation of seminarians and to popular missions. The Eudists opened seminaries at Caen (1644), Coutances (1650), Lisieux (1653), Rouen (1659), Evreux (1666), and Rennes (1670), making John Eudes one of the principal seminary-builders of seventeenth-century France alongside Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Jean-Jacques Olier, and Father Bourdoise. With Mother Marie-Madeleine Lamy he also founded in 1641 the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge for the rehabilitation of fallen women, the source of the later Good Shepherd Sisters of Angers.

John Eudes is one of the principal forerunners of the modern liturgical and devotional cult of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Persuaded that the heart is the symbol and seat of love, he composed the first liturgical Office and Mass of the Heart of Mary (celebrated by his own communities from February 8, 1648, with the approval of the bishops of Coutances, Autun, and others) and the first liturgical Office and Mass of the Heart of Jesus (1672). His feast on August 19 (the day of his death at Caen on August 19, 1680) was added to the universal Roman Calendar after his canonization. Pope Saint Pius X beatified him on April 25, 1909; Pope Pius XI canonized him on May 31, 1925, the same day as the Cure of Ars.