St. Louis de Montfort

Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort was born on January 31, 1673, in Montfort-sur-Meu, a small town in Brittany, northwestern France. He was the eldest of a large family, and his father was a notary. Even as a child, Louis showed a deep piety and a hunger for learning, often walking long distances to study with tutors and to attend Mass. When he was about eleven, he was sent to the Jesuit college at Rennes, where he excelled in his studies and began to feel the first stirrings of a priestly vocation. The poverty of his family and the disruption caused by the wars of the late seventeenth century meant that his path to the priesthood would be neither quick nor easy.

Eventually Louis made his way to Paris, where he enrolled at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. He was ordained a priest in 1700, though by his own account his years of formation were marked by deep interior trials and a long struggle to find his particular mission. He eventually left the Sulpicians in part because of disagreements over the formation of missionaries, and he spent time in Rome, where he received encouragement from Pope Clement XI, who gave him the title of Apostolic Missionary. Returning to France, he threw himself into preaching missions across the western and central regions of the country, particularly in Brittany, the Vendée, and Poitou.

Louis's preaching was characteristically direct, catechetical, and Marian. He roamed the countryside on foot, often sleeping in barns or outbuildings, and gathered enormous crowds for catechisms, processions, and the public renewal of baptismal promises. He was a fierce opponent of what he saw as the worldly Jansenism infecting French piety, and he worked tirelessly to popularize the practice of praying the Rosary. He founded the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary in several dioceses and saw the devotion take root among the poor and the rural faithful whom he served. He also established two religious congregations: the Company of Mary (the Montfort Fathers), made up of priests and brothers, and the Daughters of Wisdom, a sisterhood dedicated to the service of the poor and the education of children.

In 1712, while living in the Breton town of Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, Louis was given shelter by a community of the Daughters of Wisdom and wrote two of the works for which he is best known: the True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, which would not actually be published until 1842, and the Love of Eternal Wisdom. A year later, in 1713, he drew up the Rule of the Daughters of Wisdom and the Rule of the Missionary Priests of the Company of Mary, both of which were approved by the Bishop of Poitiers. Louis was not a healthy man in his later years; he suffered from what was likely a chronic pulmonary condition, and he was often exhausted by the rigors of mission life. He died on April 28, 1716, in Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, at the age of forty-three, and was buried there.

For roughly a century and a half after his death, Montfort remained a relatively obscure figure. Then, in 1853, a process of recovery brought his manuscript True Devotion to light, and within a few decades it had been translated into many languages and was influencing Catholic spirituality around the world. He was beatified in 1888 and canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1947, with his feast day set on April 28. His personal motto, Totus Tuus ("totally yours," addressed to the Blessed Virgin), was adopted in modified form by Karol Wojtyla and became the papal motto of John Paul II, who also took the name of his Marian devotion from Montfort. Today the Montfortian family — Montfort Fathers, Daughters of Wisdom, Brothers of Saint Gabriel, and a number of lay branches — carries on his work of mission, education, and Marian spirituality around the world.