Saint Marcellin Champagnat

Saint Marcellin Joseph Benedict Champagnat (20 May 1789 – 6 June 1840) was born in Le Rosey, village of Marlhes, near St. Etienne (Loire), France. He was the founder of the Marist Brothers, a religious congregation of brothers in the Roman Catholic Church devoted to Mary and dedicated to education. His feast day is 6 June, his death anniversary.

Marcellin was ordained as a priest on the 22nd of July 1816, and was part of a group led by Jean-Claude Colin, who founded the Society of Mary, a separate religious congregation to the Marist Brothers teaching order Marcellin founded later. Marcellin was born in the year of the storming of the Bastille, the start of the French Revolution. The religious, political, economic and social unrest of the times he lived influenced his priorities and life path.

The son of French peasants, Marcellin was born on 20 May 1789 in the village of Le Rosey near the city of Lyons. Marcellin was baptized within twenty-four hours of his birth, on the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, 1789. He was the ninth child of ten children of Jean-Baptiste and Marie Thérèse Chirat Champagnat. His father held an important position in local politics and he introduced Marcellin to many practical skills. His paternal aunt, Louise Champagnat was a sister to Jean-Baptiste, and a religious Sister of Saint Joseph. She was expelled from her convent by the new government and sought sanctuary with his family during the days of revolutionary excess.

He attended school for a very brief time. He failed to demonstrate much capacity for academic work; the brutal treatment that teachers meted out to students also worked against his settling in. His teachers told him not to continue on his vocation. By age eleven, he had decided that he preferred religious duties to the world of books.

Marcellin was a typical illiterate French peasant when as a young boy a visiting priest suggested that he might like to train for the Catholic priesthood. When Marcellin decided to study for the priesthood, he set out to get an education, and enlisted the aid of his sister Marie-Anne’s husband, Benoît Arnaud. His brother-in-law, once a seminarian and now a teacher, was considered to be a well-educated, well-esteemed, and influential man. Marcellin moved to the town of St. Sauveur and lived with his sister and her family for some months during the years 1803, 1804, and 1805. Marcellin found the early years of his studies towards the priesthood extremely difficult.

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