Saint John Eudes

Priest, Apostle of the Sacred Hearts
(1601–1680)

Saint John Eudes was born on November 14, 1601, at Ri in Normandy, France. He was educated by the Jesuits and at the age of twenty-two entered the French Oratory founded by Cardinal Bérulle, one of the great reformers of the French Church. He was ordained a priest in 1625 and immediately threw himself into the apostolate of preaching missions throughout Normandy and Brittany, a ministry he pursued with extraordinary energy for the next decades.

During the plague epidemics that ravaged Normandy in 1625 and 1631 he ministered to the sick with heroic charity, living apart from his community in a large barrel in a field so that he would not infect his brothers, while spending his days among the dying. This pastoral dedication to the sick and dying was matched by an equally passionate concern for women who had fallen into lives of sin. He founded a refuge for such women, which grew into the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity, dedicated to their rehabilitation and spiritual care.

In 1643 he left the Oratory to found the Society of Jesus and Mary, the Eudists, a congregation of priests dedicated to the running of seminaries for the formation of the diocesan clergy, a work of immense importance in the post-Tridentine reform of the Church. He founded several seminaries in Normandy and Brittany that became centres of clerical renewal.

He is remembered above all as the father of the liturgical devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. He composed the first Masses and Offices in honour of these devotions, which he celebrated with his communities from the 1640s onward, decades before the apparitions to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial. He died on August 19, 1680, and was canonised in 1925. His feast is celebrated on August 19th.