St. Marcellin Champagnat: Founder of the Marist Brothers

Who was St. Marcellin Champagnat?

St. Marcellin Champagnat was a French country priest who could hardly read when he started seminary and who went on to found one of the largest teaching congregations in the Church, the Little Brothers of Mary, better known as the Marist Brothers. He was born in the mountains above Saint-Étienne in 1789, the year the French Revolution broke out, and grew up in a France that had lost a generation of priests and schoolteachers. He gave his life to the children nobody was teaching.

His most quoted words explain everything else about him: "I cannot see a child without wanting to tell him how much Jesus loves him." We keep his feast on June 6, the day he died in 1840.

The life of St. Marcellin Champagnat

A farm boy from Marlhes

Marcellin was born on May 20, 1789, at the hamlet of Le Rosey in the parish of Marlhes, the ninth child of a farming family. His father, a farmer and merchant with more education than most, was active in local politics and gave his son a love of hands-on work. His mother and an aunt, a nun driven from her convent by the Revolution, gave him his faith and his devotion to Mary.

He had almost no schooling. When he was fourteen, a priest passing through the village told him God was calling him to the priesthood, and Marcellin began to study because, as he said, "God wills it!" People around him tried to talk him out of it.

Seminary and the Society of Mary

His years at the minor seminary of Verrières (1805–1813) were hard. At the major seminary in Lyon his classmates included Jean-Marie Vianney, the future Curé of Ars, and Jean-Claude Colin, the future founder of the Marist Fathers. A group of these seminarians dreamed of a "Society of Mary" of priests, sisters and laypeople to bring France back to Christ. Marcellin insisted that it must include brothers to teach children.

He was ordained on July 22, 1816. The next day the young priests climbed to the shrine of Our Lady of Fourvière in Lyon and placed their project under Mary's protection.

The dying boy at La Valla

Marcellin was sent as curate to La Valla, a mountain parish on the slopes of Mont Pilat. He visited the sick, taught catechism and preached simply. Then he was called to a dying seventeen-year-old who knew nothing at all of God. The encounter shook him so deeply that he would not wait any longer.

On January 2, 1817, only six months after arriving, the twenty-seven-year-old curate gathered his first two young men. The Little Brothers of Mary were born in poverty, humility and trust in God.

The Hermitage

While still a parish priest he lived with his brothers, trained them as teachers and catechists and opened schools as fast as villages asked for them. Many clergy did not understand what this young priest without money was doing. The first house filled up, and Marcellin and the brothers built a new one with their own hands: a large stone house for more than a hundred people in the valley of the Gier, which they called Notre-Dame de l'Hermitage. Freed from parish work in 1825, he gave himself entirely to forming the brothers and visiting their schools.

He called Mary his "Good Mother," his "Ordinary Resource" and the "First Superior" of the brothers, and he often prayed Psalm 127 (126 in the old numbering): "Unless the Lord build the house." His motto was "All to Jesus through Mary, all to Mary for Jesus." When the Church approved the Society of Mary in 1836 and entrusted it with the missions of Oceania, Marcellin made his vows as a Marist and sent three brothers to the Pacific with the first Marist Fathers, among them St. Peter Chanel.

His last words to his brothers

Worn out, he died at the Hermitage on June 6, 1840, at fifty-one. In his spiritual testament he left the brothers this: "May you be of one heart and one mind. May it be said of the Little Brothers of Mary as of the first Christians: see how they love one another!" The Catholic Encyclopedia counts 310 members and forty-eight schools at his death. The Holy See approved the institute on January 9, 1863.

Beatification, canonization and miracles

Pope Pius XII beatified Marcellin Champagnat in 1955, and Pope John Paul II canonized him in Rome on April 18, 1999. At the canonization the pope said that "in the midst of a world sometimes lacking the sense of God," he "remained faithful to Christ because of his unshakable faith." The Church examined healings attributed to his intercession for both steps; these are approved miracles, but the sources consulted here do not describe them, so we do not retell them.

Why St. Marcellin Champagnat is a patron of teachers

He founded a congregation whose whole work is the school, and he taught his brothers a way of teaching: love the children, give special care to the poorest and most neglected, live among them with simplicity and a family spirit, and do all of it as Mary would. Teachers, Catholic schools and young people around the world claim him. See the patron saints of teachers and all the patron saints.

Symbols of St. Marcellin Champagnat in art

• The cassock and white bands: the dress of a French priest of his day, as in Ravery's portrait.
• The crucifix: he holds one in his official portrait.
• Children around him: his whole mission. Statues often show him with a boy at his side or under his arm.
• Our Lady: a statue or image of the Virgin and Child, his "Good Mother."
• The stone house or a builder's tools: the Hermitage he built with his own hands.

Feast day and where he is honored

His feast is June 6. Marist schools mark it with Mass and celebrations. See the feast day calendar. Pilgrims visit the places of his life in the Loire: his birthplace at Le Rosey in Marlhes, the first Marist house in La Valla-en-Gier, and Notre-Dame de l'Hermitage near Saint-Chamond, the house he built, where he died and is buried.

Prayer to St. Marcellin Champagnat

The Marist Brothers pray to Mary every day with the Salve Regina, the Memorare or the Rosary, and those were Marcellin's own prayers. We can make his motto our prayer: "All to Jesus through Mary, all to Mary for Jesus." And we can ask his help in our own words for teachers, for children and for every young person who has never heard that God loves them: "St. Marcellin Champagnat, pray for us."