Via Incarnationis The Way of the Incarnation

After the Wars of Religion, priests and devout women led a revival of prayer in France. The historian Henri Bremond popularized the name of their spiritual family: the French School of spirituality. Their master, Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, who founded the French Oratory in 1611, never tired of contemplating the Word made flesh; Pope Urban VIII called him the apostle of the Incarnate Word. This school teaches the Christian to adore Jesus and to live by his life.

For Bérulle, each mystery of the life of Jesus remains a “state” that a Christian can enter through adoration. His disciples drew from it a prayer you will say each morning, handed down by Jean-Jacques Olier, who had it from Father de Condren: “O Jesus, living in Mary, come and live in your servants.” From this school came the seminaries that formed generations of priests; Saint Vincent de Paul, whom Bérulle guided, and Saint John Baptist de La Salle, trained at Saint-Sulpice, are among its heirs.

In Paris, the opening Mass is celebrated at Saint-Sulpice, where Olier became parish priest in 1642 and whose first stone Queen Anne of Austria laid in 1646. At the seminary of Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the Sulpicians still train priests, you will pray before the heart of their founder. At Pontoise, the Carmel founded in 1605 keeps the tomb of Madame Acarie, Blessed Marie of the Incarnation: a mother of six, she welcomed Bérulle and Saint Francis de Sales to her home, and with Bérulle brought the first Carmelite nuns of Saint Teresa of Ávila’s reform from Spain in 1604.

In Normandy, Caen keeps the memory of Saint John Eudes, who founded the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, the Eudists, there in 1643, after twenty years in the Oratory under Bérulle and Condren. Pope Leo XIII recognized him as the author of the liturgical worship of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. His remains were laid in 1884 in the crypt of Notre-Dame-de-la-Gloriette.

The last days follow Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, also trained at Saint-Sulpice. You will enter the house where he was born, at Montfort-sur-Meu, then climb the Calvary of Pontchâteau, which he raised with hundreds of volunteers. Louis XIV had it partly torn down, and it was rebuilt in 1821. At Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre he rests beside Blessed Marie-Louise Trichet, the first Daughter of Wisdom; Saint John Paul II, whose motto Totus tuus was inspired by his teaching, came to pray there in 1996. There, those who wish may make the consecration he taught, giving themselves to Jesus Christ, Wisdom incarnate, through the hands of Mary, after thirty-three days of preparation begun at home and completed on the way.