Marcellin Champagnat, Founder of the Marist Brothers, 1789 - 1840.

Here is another of the first Marists. In spite of our distance from the outlook and customs of the founding generation, Marcellin is still a very accessible kind of person. We can come close to him personally, often empathise with him, wish we had known him. He was a Marist priest, founded the Institute of Marist Brothers, and was deeply involved in the whole project for a Society of Mary.

Marcellin Champagnat was one of the group of seminarians caught up by the inspiration for a Society of Mary. They wanted it to be a religious order, like a tree with several branches. He always considered the group had specially mandated him to found the Marist Brothers. His own youthful experience had impressed on him the desperate need for Catholics to give basic education to rural youth. Only a religious congregation could resource this at that time.

Shortly after his ordination in 1816, Marcellin set about getting young men together, giving them basic education and religious training, and then sending them out in small groups to villages where the parish clergy asked for their assistance. From this quite practical and obscure beginning, sprang a numerous, world-wide religious congregation.

Of course, like most initiators, Champagnat ran up against serious problems: financial difficulties, problems with some of the many people he had to relate to, legal objections from ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Marcellin became prematurely worn out….he was only 51 when he died….yet he remained basically confident in his faith that this was “the work of Mary”, that she whom he called “Our Ordinary Resource”...would see us through.

Champagnat’s determination to keep the brothers Marist, not to allow them to be absorbed into other groups by diocesan or state authorities; his furtherance of the priest’s branch, in spite of tiresome disappointments or contradictions; his promotion of the sisters: all was fidelity to his vision of one great Society wanted by Mary for her work.

Through it all Marcellin remains wonderfully human in his graced kindliness, good humour, patience and common sense...but also in the occasional sharp remark or piece of “saintly” unreasonableness! We will certainly come across him again in “Marist Links”.

Denis Green sm

Prayer for the feastday of Saint Marcellin Champagnat, celebrated on the 6th June.

St. Marcellin Champagnat by Sean Sammon FMS, Superior General of the Marist Brothers (2005)