Saint John Eudes

Jean Eudes was born in Ri, a village in Normandy, on November 14, 1601, the eldest of seven children. He was a priest of the Oratory and became one of the most sought-after preachers in France: he preached parish missions all over the country and made it all the way to the court of the Sun King. That isn’t what he should be remembered for, though. In 1641, during a mission in Caen, he came up against something nobody wanted to see: prostitutes who wanted to stop had nowhere to go. No convent would take them in, no family would take them back. He opened a house for them, and from it came the Order of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge. In 1643 he also founded the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, the Eudists, to train the clergy: in a France where priests often had no preparation at all, opening seminaries was a revolution. He spread devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, composing Masses and Offices for it a good thirty years before the revelations to Margaret Mary Alacoque. Pius X, in the decree of beatification, called him the “father, apostle and doctor” of that devotion. He fought Jansenism, and the Jansenists made his life hard for years. He died in Caen on August 19, 1680. Pius XI proclaimed him a saint in 1925. If your name is John, today is your name day.