Saint Peter Julian Eymard

Pierre-Julien Eymard was born at La Mure, in the Isère, near Grenoble, on February 4, 1811. He was the last of ten children, eight of whom died in infancy, and his father opposed his wish to become a priest. He entered the seminary at twenty and was ordained for the diocese of Grenoble on July 20, 1834. After a short time in parish work he joined the newly founded Society of Mary, the Marist Fathers, at Lyon in 1839, and he taught and held office in the young society.

In 1845, during a Eucharistic procession, he asked God for the apostolic zeal of Saint Paul. In 1849, as provincial of the Marists, he went to Paris, where he met Marie-Thérèse Dubouché and Father Raymond de Cuers. With de Cuers he founded the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, devoted to the adoration of the Eucharist, and on May 13, 1856, the Church in Paris gave its consent. Public exposition of the Blessed Sacrament began in its first chapel, at 114 rue d’Enfer, on January 6, 1857, and Pope Pius IX approved the congregation by decree in June 1863.

In 1858, with Marguerite Guillot, he founded the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament, a contemplative congregation of women. He worked to improve the lot of poor working people in Paris and prepared adults for their first Communion, and he guided many people by letter. In 1862 and 1863 the young sculptor Auguste Rodin, grieving the death of his sister, lived in the community as a lay brother for about five months. Exhausted by his work, Eymard died in the family house at La Mure on August 1, 1868, at fifty-seven.

He was buried in the cemetery of La Mure. In 1877, over the objections of many people of the town, his remains were moved to Paris, to the Corpus Christi chapel of his Congregation on the avenue de Friedland, built and consecrated in 1876. Pope Pius XI beatified him in 1925, and the body was then placed in a side chapel on the right, where a gilt bronze shrine with a wax recumbent figure of the saint by Pierre Imans stands above the altar. Pope John XXIII canonized him on December 9, 1962, at the close of the first session of the Second Vatican Council. According to his Congregation, Saint John Paul II added his memorial on August 2 to the General Roman Calendar in 1995.

The Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament still serve the Corpus Christi chapel, which the archdiocese of Paris lists as a place of pilgrimage. In March 2026 a group from the Congregation’s province in Vietnam visited it on a pilgrimage that also took in La Mure and the other places of his life. At La Mure his first grave, now empty, is marked by a memorial in the form of a prayer kneeler topped by a monstrance, beside the graves of his sister Marianne and of Nanette Bernard, who lived with the family as an adopted sister. In New York City the church of St. Jean Baptiste keeps a reliquary with a bone of his right arm.

Rodin modeled a bust of him during his months in the community. Eymard rejected it and Rodin refused to change it, and casts of it are now shown in houses of the Congregation around the world. In the Corpus Christi chapel the stained glass is by Georges Lavergne, and the façade window shows the glorification of the Eucharist, with Father Eymard at the center. At La Mure three stained-glass windows made in 2018 for the chapel that bears his name show the main events of his life.

• Paris, Corpus Christi chapelAt 23 avenue de Friedland, near the Étoile, the chapel of the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament, where his body has rested since 1877, now in the side chapel on the right.
• La Mure, chapel of Saint-Pierre-Julien-EymardOn the avenue du Docteur-Tagnard, on the site where he was baptized and buried, restored in 2014; open daily from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. except on public holidays, with his first grave in the cemetery behind it.
• La Mure, the Eymard family houseThe house where he died on August 1, 1868, which receives pilgrims and keeps the bed in which he died.