21 Facts About Marcellin Champagnat

Marcellin Champagnat was the founder of the Marist Brothers, a religious congregation of brothers in the Catholic Church devoted to Mary and dedicated to education.

Marcellin Champagnat was born in the year of the storming of the Bastille, the start of the French Revolution.

Marcellin Champagnat was readmitted, through the efforts of his mother, his parish priest, and the superior of the seminary.

At the beginning of his second year, Marcellin Champagnat settled down to a more sober lifestyle.

Marcellin Champagnat continued to apply himself to his studies throughout his second year at the seminary.

Marcellin Champagnat left Verrieres for St Irenaeus, the major seminary near Lyons.

Marcellin Champagnat then attended the major seminary at Saint Irenaeus in Lyon for his spiritual and theological formation as a priest.

Marcellin Champagnat was no natural scholar but through hard work and the support of his mother and aunt he was finally ordained.

Marcellin Champagnat was ordained on 22 July 1816, at the age of twenty-seven, and the next day, travelled to the shrine of Our Lady of Fourvieres above Lyons with others interested in establishing a Society of Mary.

Marcellin Champagnat was struck by the isolation in which people lived and the lack of education in the rural area.

Marcellin Champagnat was motivated to establish a society that would care for indigent children and display "great zeal for the poor".

Marcellin Champagnat stated on another occasion, "I cannot see a child without wanting to tell him how much God loves him".

On 2 January 1817, Marcellin Champagnat encouraged two young men Jean-Marie Granjon and Jean-Baptiste Audras, to join him in forming the nucleus of the Marist Brothers.

In 1824, when the new French king, Charles X, transferred the oversight of elementary education to the Catholic Church, Marcellin Champagnat won support to build a new and larger novitiate, which became the Notre Dame Hermitage, and the brothers began to spread more widely.

In 1818 Marcellin Champagnat opened the first Marist school whose timetable he designed in such a way to fit the farming needs of his parishioners.

Marcellin Champagnat set fees for the school at a level he knew most rural families could meet.

Marcellin Champagnat had a great devotion to the guardian angels, and directed that an image of a guardian angel be placed in every classroom.

In view of Marcellin Champagnat's declining health in 1839 Jean-Claude Colin advised him to have the Brothers elect a successor.

Marcellin Champagnat's cause was formally opened on 9 August 1896, granting him the title of Servant of God.

Marcellin Champagnat was declared Venerable on 11 July 1920 by Pope Benedict XV, beatified by Pope Pius XII on 29 May 1955, and canonised by Pope John Paul II on 18 April 1999.

Marcellin Champagnat never wrote an extended exposition of his educational philosophy, but he believed that to teach children one must love them; secular subjects should be well taught as a means of attracting children to the schools, and they would learn the basic elements of their faith as well.