Saint Peter Fourier

Pierre Fourier was born on November 30, 1565, at Mirecourt, in the Duchy of Lorraine, the eldest of three sons of a cloth merchant. At fifteen he went to the Jesuit university of Pont-à-Mousson. In 1585 he entered the canons regular of Saint Augustine at the abbey of Chaumousey, and he was ordained a priest at Trier on February 24, 1589.

In 1597 he chose, among three parishes offered to him, Mattaincourt, where Calvinist influence was strong enough to earn the town the name of Little Geneva. He remained its parish priest until 1632, and he was remembered as the good Father of Mattaincourt.

From 1597 he guided Blessed Alix Le Clerc, a young woman of Remiremont, and her companions, who wished to teach poor girls free of charge. Their first school opened at Poussay in 1598, and in 1616 the Holy See approved the community as the Canonesses Regular of Saint Augustine of the Congregation of Our Lady. By the time of his death the congregation had about forty schools.

In 1621 Bishop Jean des Porcelets of Toul asked him to reform the canons regular of his diocese, and in 1625 he was sent to the principality of Salm, where he restored Catholic worship. The reformed houses of canons were united as the Congregation of Our Saviour, which elected him superior general in 1632. After the French invasion of Lorraine he refused to swear loyalty to Louis XIII, and in 1636 he withdrew with his community to Gray, in the County of Burgundy, where he died on December 9, 1640.

Pope Benedict XIII beatified him in 1730, and Pope Leo XIII canonized him on May 27, 1897. His tomb is in the basilica of Mattaincourt, built on the site of his parish church and consecrated in 1853. The diocese of Saint-Dié keeps his feast on December 9 and holds its diocesan pilgrimage at Mattaincourt each July; on June 29, 2026, Bishop François Gourdon celebrated there the jubilee Mass of the priests and deacons of the diocese.

His work reached North America through Troyes, where the Congregation of Our Lady had a convent with an external congregation that gathered girls for religious instruction. Marguerite Bourgeoys joined it in 1640, left Troyes for Montreal in February 1653, and there founded the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, which received its first pupils on April 30, 1658.

Peter Fourier is shown as a canon regular, with a chaplet and images of the Virgin Mary, and his statue stands in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome among the founders of religious orders. At Gray, the oratory of Saint-Pierre-Fourier in the Hôtel Gauthiot d’Ancier keeps his portrait by an unknown painter, probably of the later seventeenth century, whose inscription records that he died there on December 9, 1640.

• Mattaincourt, basilica of Saint-Pierre-FourierThe basilica consecrated in 1853 on the site of the church where he served as parish priest, which keeps his tomb.
• Mattaincourt, Musée Saint-Pierre-FourierHis former presbytery, now a museum devoted to him, which the parish pilgrimages visit with the basilica.
• MirecourtThe town in the Vosges where he was born on November 30, 1565.
• GrayThe town in Haute-Saône where he died in exile; the oratory of Saint-Pierre-Fourier on the rue du Marché keeps his portrait.