Saint Marcellin Champagnat

Marcellin Champagnat was born on May 20, 1789, at Le Rosey, a hamlet of Marlhes in the uplands of the Pilat, and baptized in the old church of Marlhes, replaced by the present church in 1889. His father, a farmer and merchant with an education above the average, held local offices; his mother and an aunt, a nun driven from her convent, formed his faith. He entered the seminary of Verrières in 1805 and the seminary of Saint-Irénée at Lyon in 1813, and when his studies were in doubt his mother took him on foot to the shrine of Saint John Francis Regis at La Louvesc.

He was ordained a priest on July 22, 1816. The next day he and other young priests consecrated themselves to Mary at the shrine of Fourvière in Lyon, the act the Marist family regards as its formal beginning. On August 15, 1816, he became curate of La Valla, on the slopes of Mont Pilat. Called on October 28 to a dying adolescent, he resolved to begin at once a congregation of teaching brothers, and on January 2, 1817, Jean-Marie Granjon and Jean-Baptiste Audras began common life with him in a rented house at La Valla, the start of the Little Brothers of Mary, known as the Marist Brothers.

As the Brothers grew, he chose a site in the valley of the Gier, near Saint-Chamond, in 1824, and the first Brothers, helped by two masons, built there the house of Notre-Dame de l’Hermitage, large enough for over a hundred people. The community moved in during the spring of 1825, and that year he was freed from his parish duties. In 1836 the Church approved the Society of Mary and entrusted it with the mission of Oceania, and he sent three Brothers with the first Marist priests. According to the Holy See’s biography, his motto was “All to Jesus through Mary, all to Mary for Jesus.”

He died of cancer at the Hermitage on June 6, 1840, at the age of fifty-one, and was buried there on June 8. In his last message he asked that among the Brothers there be one heart and one soul.

Pope Pius XII beatified him on May 29, 1955, and Pope John Paul II canonized him in Saint Peter’s Square on April 18, 1999. His relics rest in the chapel of the Hermitage, still the mother house of the Marist Brothers, and the room where he spent his last days is kept. The house was renovated from 2010 and receives Brothers, lay teachers, families and pilgrims from many countries; it marked the bicentennial of its building in 2025. His feast is kept on June 6, the day of his death. The Marist Brothers run schools in the United States, among them Marist schools in New York and Chicago, whose pilgrims visited Le Rosey, Marlhes and the Hermitage in 2017.

The chapel built in his memory at Le Rosey, beside his birth house, has windows by the Paris artist Borghetto showing his baptism, a bouquet he offered to Our Lady, the shrine of Fourvière, his ministry at Marlhes and La Valla, and his beatification by Pius XII in 1955. In 2025, for the bicentennial of the Hermitage, the Marist province gave the house an icon painted in Greece by Nektarios Mamais, “Champagnat, the Builder,” which shows him as saint, priest and founder holding the house of 1825, with a rock and violets, the flowers that stand for the virtues of Mary.

• Saint-Chamond, Notre-Dame de l’HermitageThe mother house of the Marist Brothers on the banks of the Gier, built in 1824 and 1825, where his relics rest in the chapel and his room is kept.
• Marlhes, Le RoseyHis birth house and the chapel built in his memory, with windows of his life; admission by free-will offering.
• La Valla-en-GierThe mountain parish where he was curate from 1816 and gathered the first Brothers on January 2, 1817.
• Lyon, FourvièreThe shrine where he and his companions consecrated themselves to Mary on July 23, 1816.

On our ways: Lyon.