Frédéric Ozanam
| Blessed Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam |
|
|---|---|
| Born |
April 23, 1813 Milan, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | September 8, 1853 (aged 40) Marseilles, France |
| Venerated in | Catholic Church |
| Beatified | August 22, 1997, Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris by Pope John Paul II |
| Feast | September 09 |
Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam (pronounced: [ɑ̃.twan.fʁe.de.ʁik o.za.nam]; April 23, 1813 – September 8, 1853) was a French literary scholar, lawyer, journalist and social justice advocate. He founded with fellow students the Conference of Charity, later known as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in 1997, hence he may be properly called Blessed Frederic by Catholics. His feast day is September 9.
Frédéric was born on April 23, 1813, to Jean and Marie Ozanam. He was the fifth of Jean and Marie Ozanam’s 14 children, one of only three to reach adulthood. His family, which believed itself to have Jewish blood, had been settled in the region around Lyon, France, for many centuries. An ancestor of Frédéric, Jacques Ozanam (1640–1717), was a noted mathematician. Jean Ozanam, Frédéric's father, had served in the armies of the First French Republic, but with the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the founding of the First French Empire, he turned to trade, to teaching, and finally to medicine.
Frédéric was born in Milan, but brought up in Lyon. In his youth he experienced a period of doubt regarding the Catholic faith, during which he was strongly influenced by one of his teachers at the Collège de Lyon, the priest Abbé Noirot. His conservative and religious instincts showed themselves early, and he published Réflexions sur la Doctrine de Saint-Simon a pamphlet against Saint-Simonianism in 1831, which attracted the attention of the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, born in the area. Ozanam also found time to help organize and write for the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, a lay Catholic organization founded in the city with the aim of supporting Catholic missionaries, of which many came from the area. That autumn he went to study law in Paris, where he suffered a great deal from homesickness. Ozanam fell in with the Ampère family (living for a time with the mathematician André-Marie Ampère), and through them with other prominent Catholics of the time, such as Count François-René de Chateaubriand, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, and Charles Forbes René de Montalembert.
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