Anybody who knows anything about religious life in Canada knows that the Catholic Church in that country would not look anything like it does today without the yeoman work of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. The OMI Fathers have been instrumental in the stretch of Catholicism across Canada, especially its westward expansion across the Prairies. And the founder of the Oblates was St. Eugène de Mazenod whose feast day (May 21) is an optional memorial in Canada.

De Mazenod was born in France in 1782. Within a decade, his aristocratic family fled the country ahead of the French revolutionaries. The family sought refuge in Italy, journeying from Venice to Naples to Sicily, responding to local dislocations on the peninsula. Eventually, his parents separated, causing the young man grief throughout his life: his father encouraging his Christian thoughts, his mother less so. Although in Venice de Mazenod came under the tutelage of a priest who furthered his education, in Sicily he fell into noble society and “discovered his roots.” He maintained that attitude when he was able to return to his mother in Aix-la-Provence, France, hoping for privilege and a well-dowried girl. He intended to marry one such woman, but tuberculosis put an end to her and their engagement. But while the world enticed de Mazenod, he also found himself divided: it enticed him only so far, before he got bored of it. God was making other plans.

The future saint dates his conversion to Good Friday 1807 when, in contemplation of the Cross, he became aware of the void in his life and his own state of mortal sin. Cooperating with God’s grace, he began studies for the priesthood the next year and was ordained on Dec. 21, 1811, at Amiens. Among the opportunities he had was serving Pope Pius VII who, at that time, happened to be a prisoner held in France by Napoleon.

When he returned to Aix, de Mazenod sought not to be appointed to a parish but to be designated to minister to those who — borrowing Pope Francis’ vocabulary — were on the “peripheries” of that city and society. Reaching out to the poor, prisoners, and the religiously illiterate eventually inspired him to form an order for that purpose: from this, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate was born in 1816, receiving papal approval a decade later. The order spread worldwide, arriving in Canada — where it made such an imprint on the country’s religious history — in 1841.

De Mazenod’s path was somewhat different. He had assisted his aged uncle, who was Bishop of Marseille, as Vicar General and, in 1837, the Pope appointed him as successor. De Mazenod was bishop for 24 years, until his death in 1861. His beatification took place in 1975, and his canonization in 1995. 

The charcoal and pastel image here, found in the de Mazenod postulation archives but about which little else (date, painter) is known, alludes to an important moment in Oblate history. On Aug. 15, 1822, de Mazenod was in Aix blessing a statue of Our Lady as the Immaculate Conception. After the formal celebrations, he remained in private prayer at the statue, which has been christened the “Oblate Madonna.” In his writings, de Mazenod emerged from that prayerful experience convinced of the rightness and divine warrant behind the religious community he was working to establish. Our Lady shored up his faith.

At de Mazenod’s canonization, Pope St. John Paul II described his life as “marked by a heroic degree of faith, hope and apostolic charity. Eugène de Mazenod was one of those apostles who prepared the modern age, our age.” An anti-sign of the modern age is loneliness: physical loneliness (including people dying alone), psychological loneliness (people alienated from each other), and existential loneliness (people on the “peripheries,” regarded as part of “throwaway culture”). De Mazenod saw those people that others often don’t see and sought not just to reach out to them, but also to sanctify them. In that, he anticipates our “modern age.”

For more reading, see here, here, here and here.