Blessed Frédéric Ozanam

Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam was born in Milan on April 23, 1813, and grew up in Lyon, where his family had long been settled. In 1831 he went to Paris to study law, and for a time he lodged with the family of the physicist André-Marie Ampère. He took his bachelor’s degree in law in 1834 and his doctorate in law in 1836, and in 1839 he received a doctorate in letters with a thesis on the philosophy of Dante.

In 1833 Ozanam and five fellow students, with Emmanuel Bailly, a married layman whom they chose as their first president, founded the Conference of Charity to serve the poor of Paris. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the archdiocese of Paris and the Holy See date the first meeting to April 23, 1833, his twentieth birthday; some accounts place it in May 1833. Bailly sent the young men to Sister Rosalie Rendu, a Daughter of Charity who served in the Mouffetard district, and she taught them to visit the poor in their homes. The conference soon took Saint Vincent de Paul as its patron, and the Society grew from it.

In 1839 he was appointed professor of commercial law at Lyon. In October 1840 he won the competitive examination for the chair of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, where he first taught as assistant to Claude Fauriel and succeeded him as full professor in 1844. In June 1841 he married Amélie Soulacroix, daughter of the rector of the University of Lyon, and they had one daughter, Marie. During the Revolution of 1848 he wrote for L’Ère nouvelle, a paper he had founded, in defense of the working classes, and in one of his lectures he proposed associations of workers. The Holy See counts him among the forerunners of the social teaching of the Church.

Worn out by tuberculosis, he went to Italy in the hope of recovering, and on the way home he died in Marseille on September 8, 1853, at forty. He was buried in the crypt of the church of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes, at the Institut Catholique in Paris.

Further reading: Lyon: A Pilgrim’s Guide to Fourvière and the Martyrs of 177.

His spiritual writings were approved on November 11, 1949, and his cause was opened. Saint John Paul II beatified him on Friday, August 22, 1997, in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, during World Youth Day. His feast is kept on September 9 as an optional memorial in Paris. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a lay society, is now present across the world. In the United States it was founded on November 20, 1845, at the Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France, in St. Louis, Missouri.

His chief memorials are in Paris. A statue of Ozanam stands at the entrance of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes, the church of the Institut Catholique on the rue de Vaugirard, where he is buried. A medallion with his likeness is set in the garden of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, on the boulevard du Montparnasse, beside the square that the city named after him. The diocese of Paris also points pilgrims to 7 rue Garancière, where he lived, and to the church of Saint-Sulpice, which it links to the founding of 1833.

• Paris, Saint-Joseph-des-CarmesThe church of the Institut Catholique at 70 rue de Vaugirard, with his tomb in the crypt and his statue at the entrance.
• Paris, Saint-Étienne-du-MontThe church on the place Sainte-Geneviève where Abbé Faudet encouraged Ozanam and his companions to serve the poor.
• Paris, Notre-Dame-des-ChampsThe church at 91 boulevard du Montparnasse, with a medallion of him in its garden beside the square Frédéric-Ozanam.

• Via CaritatisThe Way of Charity, seven daysDay I, Paris