A General History of the Society of Mary: The Society of Mary in the Congregational
Movement of the Nineteenth Century (Foundation, Mission, and Institutional
Configuration) 1817-1875
Volume I
by
Antonio Gascón Aranda, SM
Translation by Benjamin Dougherty
Dayton, Ohio
NACMS
2015
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Translated from the Spanish: Historia General de la Compañía de María (Marianistas):
La compañía de María en el movimiento congregacional del siglo XIX (Fundación, misión y
configuración institucional) (1817-1875) (Madrid: Publicaciones Marianistas, 2007), vol. 1.
Translator’s Note
Translation is a selective art. Rarely can a sentence in one language be rendered in another
without losing some of the original meaning. Translating almost always involves a careful
selection of which aspects of a phrase or sentence will be carried over at the expense of other
aspects. A translator’s duty is always first to the reader, and second to the text. I have attempted
to remain as faithful as possible to the original Spanish. When I have chosen to deviate from it, I
did so solely for the purpose of making an idea more easily understood by the modern English
reader.
Some words or phrases simply have no corresponding word or phrase in English. In those
cases, the words are left in their original language. Two common examples are collège and lycée,
which are French words for two different kinds of schools. There are no schools in the United
States that are equivalent to the collège or the lycée. Two other words that were left untranslated
were bourgeois and bourgeoisie. The idea that the bourgeoisie and bourgeois culture played a
key role in the development of the Society of Mary throughout the nineteenth century is a
repeated theme throughout the text. It is used so frequently and in such varied ways that
depending on circumstances, the word could be translated in any of more than a dozen ways.
—Benjamin Dougherty
Prologue
The Society of Mary (Marianists) was founded in Bordeaux, France, on October 2, 1817, by a
Catholic priest, Father William Joseph Chaminade (1761-1850). Chaminade and a group of
sodalists from the Marian Sodality of Bordeaux founded a new religious institute dedicated to the
Virgin Mary, with the objective of sustaining the faith and multiplying Christians, for the
purpose of combating the religious indifference of the modern era.
From the first moment of its birth, the Society of Mary directed its missionary charism
toward the evangelization of youth by means of teaching. Although the task of teaching did not
completely realize the evangelizing intention of the Founder, nevertheless, it was the work with
which the Marianist brothers were familiar, and they dedicated themselves to this ministry,
almost exclusively, from the time of the foundation of the new religious institute until the years
following the Second Vatican Council. For this reason, a study of laws about teaching and the
pedagogy of the time occupies an important place in the present history of the Society of Mary.
From the first moments of the foundation, the new religious agreed they also would preach in
churches and at retreats and establish and direct secular associations, or Marian Sodalities.
The Society of Mary found itself among the new religious institutes (or congregations) of
France arising after the Revolution of 1789. In this sense, the Society of Mary belongs to the
great blossoming of religious institutes arising in the Catholic Church during the nineteenth
century; a blossoming which was a true work of the Holy Spirit in the Church. By consequence,
the Society of Mary was born in the bosom of the evangelical experience of consecration and
mission of the nineteenth century Church, and much of its charismatic identity (in the form of its
life and mission) was a response to the characteristics of the so-called congregational movement.
The congregational movement was a new form of religious life characterized by the union of
brothers with simple vows under the direct obedience to a superior general. This new form of
religious life propagated itself in the new liberal society, in perfect cultural synthesis with the
values of the bourgeoisie, the dominant social class in modernity. It is significant that through
their ministry of teaching youth, Marianist religious work to better the community by integrating
the masses of peasants and working class people in the new political, economic, cultural, and
working institutions of modern society. In this method, the transmission of the Catholic faith
happens within the context of action with the social and cultural development of the people to
which the Marianist religious direct their teaching efforts.
With their simple vows and their clearly apostolic orientation, working closely with the
laity (schools, hospitals, orphanages, networks of Catholic publishers, etc.), the modern religious
congregations created a new form of consecrated life that is strongly missionary, active, and
effective in its social and evangelical works. The peasants, skilled workers, and urban working
classes came to know the social utility of religion, Catholicism, and the consecrated life, in the
midst of the bourgeois mentality, through social, educational, and welfare work. The new
congregations also responded to the Catholicism of the workers and encouraged them to cultivate
a deep interior life, which responds as much to the foundational spiritual experience as to the
missionary task of continuing development.
This volume treats the foundation of the Society of Mary in its first 50 years of history.
Therefore, we will study the nature or spiritual identity of this new religious congregation of the
Catholic Church and the process of institutionalization of its forms of life and apostolate,
governance, administration, economy, initial formation, forms of piety, etc. That is to say, all
that forms the social-religious body, with its spiritual values and institutional environment, in an
intimate unity of life and mission. This volume begins in the time of the Generalate of its
Founder, Blessed William Joseph Chaminade (1818-45), and his two successors, Father George
Caillet (1845-68) and Father John Chevaux (1868-75). In its canonical and civil development,
these were the years of the approbation of the Society of Mary by the bishop of Bordeaux,
Bishop d’Aviau, in 1818, as a diocesan congregation; later came the actual decree of November
16, 1825, that awarded it legal recognition in the view of the French state as a pious association
dedicated to primary education; finally, Pope Pius IX gave it canonical approbation by an oral
decree of May 12, 1865. Still to come was the approbation of the Constitutions by Pope Leo
XIII, in 1891, during the Generalate of Father Joseph Simler (1876-1905).
The Society of Mary was born and grew during the Restoration (1814-30), a politically
and culturally favorable time. One can see Bertier de Sauvigny repairing French life during the
Restoration; those were the years in which the modern transformation of France occured, thanks
to the work of Fresnel and d’Ampère, de Lamarck and de Cuvier, de Burnouf and de
Champollion, de Benjamin Constant and de Bonald, de Lamennais and de Chateaubriand, de
Saint-Simon and de Augusto Comte, de Victor Hugo and de Lamartine, de Delacroix and de
Berlioz. These years were characterized by a new moral sensibility, new intellectual interests, a
new scientific vision and historical reality, faith in material and moral progress, the practice of
the parliamentary system and political participation, and the perfection of the preindustrial
economy and the incipient passage to the mechanization of production. Thus, French society
developed a favorable atmosphere for the intellectual life, the sciences, letters, and arts; but even
more, for the religious-spiritual values. In this context, the young Society of Mary received the
right to teach from the governments of the Restoration and Napoleon III. The Society was helped
by the desire for education and the economic development of French society. In short, this
confluence of favorable factors contributed to the expansion of the nascent Society of Mary.
Regarding its geographic expansion, in its first 50 years of history, the Society of Mary
extended itself to the Southeast (Garonne Basin), Northeast (Alsace and Franche-Comté) and
North (Paris); and it quickly passed to Switzerland (1839), the United States (1849), Mainz (the
Grand Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt, Germany, in 1852), and Austria (1857). In the European
countries the Marianist school responded to the confrontation of the Catholics against the liberals
in power, by claiming the right of the hierarchy and parents to educate their children according to
Catholic principles, against the teaching monopoly of the state. It was not the same in the United
States where each state ensured that there was full liberty to teach. In that country, the distinctive
nationalities of Catholic immigrants created a network of parochial schools with the purpose of
passing on the faith and Catholic culture of each individual nationality. The teaching system and
pedagogy of the Marianists adapted to the laws and necessities of each country. But the
liberatization of French education, by the Falloux law of 1850, permitted the Society of Mary to
fully develop its quality pedagogy in the direction of full collèges of elementary and secondary
education. Among those, the one which stands out is the prestigious Collège Stanislas of Paris.
Historical science concerns itself with the life of human groups and institutions; life
expressed in its multitude of values, behaviors, and works. Thus, a historical analysis explores
the internal and external conditions of human action. But the history of the Church, of its
members and institutions, tries, even more, to describe the action of the risen Jesus Christ in the
works of his disciples. With the intention of revealing this divine presence, I have tried to keep
myself from analyzing the religious motivations of the origin, configuration, and action of the
Society of Mary and its religious. I am convinced the true history of the Society of Mary is laden
with traces of the Holy Spirit who acts in the conscience and the deeds of each Marianist
religious. The vivid holiness that has been handed down to us is the best gift which the religious
of the Society of Mary have to share with the Church and society.
The general history of the Society of Mary, the first volume of which appears now, was
begun because of a mandate from the General Chapter of 1991, which bore the title of Mission
and Culture, and “took as the perspective for its work the Marianist community in mission in
today’s culture.” The capitulants reflected on the method of being and of doing because “our
work is actually to evangelize in today’s culture” (presentation of the Chapter to the religious by
Superior General Father Quentin Hakenewerth). An objective given by the capitulants to the
General Assistant for Religious Life was “to promote appreciation of the Marianist charism,”
because we are convinced that it is not possible to evangelize in a culture without possessing an
identity or “Marianist culture.” An instrument for discovering our identity or culture is the study
of our history. Thus the Chapter established the following objective: “To organize the materials
for a history of the Society of Mary and to generate a plan by the preparation of this history.”
The task was entrusted to the hands of the Assistant for Religious Life, Father José María Arnáiz,
assisted by a team of Marianists who gathered at the General Administration in Rome,
November 23-24, 1992. (See Revista Marianista Internacional, no. 14.3, June 1993.) At this
meeting, it was decided that each Marianist province, country, or regional unit would arrange its
own archives and write its own history. With these finished histories a final editor would write
the general history to be presented at the General Chapter of 2001. Father Bernard Vial was
named chairman of this team collaborating with the General Assistant for Religious Life. The
minutes of the successive meetings of this working team were published in SM 3 Offices, n. 37
(Jan. 30, 1993) and n. 60 (Dec. 1, 1995). Unfortunately, neither were the provincial archives
prepared to start the investigation immediately, nor were the designated persons free to take this
work as their sole occupation. Nevertheless, some national histories turned up (from the United
States, Japan, Austria-Germany-Hungary, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Argentina, and
Italy); other places already had monographs of their history (Switzerland, Peru, Puerto Rico,
French-speaking Africa, and Eastern Africa, etc.). With these texts and the background
documents in the General Archives of the Society of Mary in Rome, it was possible to undertake
the writing of a general history of the Society.
In December 1993, Father Antonio Gascón was asked to write the history of the Society
in Spain (published in 2002). At the meeting of the Commission for the History of the Society of
Mary, held in Madrid in May 2000, Father Gascón was asked to write the entire history of the
Society. The present first volume is the product of that request.
Many people helped me move this work forward; I owe them all my deepest gratitude. In
the first place, those who had confidence in me: Father José María Arnáiz, Superior General
Father David Fleming and his Council (Brother José María Alvira, Brother Javier Anso, and
Father George Cerniglia); I am also grateful for the assistance of the general archivist of the
Society of Mary, Brother Ambrogio Albano and the late Brother Dario Tucci, with the assistance
of Mrs. Michèle Potet and Anna Maria Ghiselinni; Brother Michael McAward, SM, helped me
with the reproduction of illustrations. I am intellectually indebted to all Marianists whose studies
and monographs cited in the bibliography have allowed me to better know the history of the
Society of Mary. Finally, there are so many other people, religious and lay, who with their words
of encouragement, counsel, and instruction have made my work easier; the complete list of
people to whom I am grateful is too long to put here. I thank them all for their inestimable
material and their intellectual and moral assistance in composing this work which I hope will be
beneficial to the Society of Mary and the Marianist Family.
1
Life and Mission of Father William Joseph Chaminade
Father William Joseph Chaminade received his formation during the final years of the ancien
régime, in a Church which had inherited a missionary thrust from the Council of Trent. Also, the
years he was a seminarian and a young priest witnessed the rise of modern thought characterized
by a spirit of erudition, rationalism, and empiricism that, in its cultural form, unleashed the
immense social phenomenon of religious indifference and, in its political expression, led to the
Revolution of 1789.
A student and later a professor and business manager of Saint Charles Seminary in
Mussidan, Father Chaminade, along with the clergy of Saint Charles, refused to swear the oath
demanded by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; Chaminade, then, had to leave Mussidan for
Bordeaux. He arrived there just before the Reign of Terror, during which he exercised his
priestly ministry in secret. Exiled from France, he took refuge in Saragossa (1797), where a
colony of French priests drew up a pastoral plan for the reconstruction of the French Church after
they returned from exile. Subsequently, Chaminade developed his pastoral activity during the
decade of the Napoleonic Empire, the Restoration, and the years of the liberal-bourgeois
revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century.
In this historical context his pastoral plan to devote himself to the mission of reChristianizing France was conceived—France having been devastated by the Revolution and the
religious indifference of the modern philosophers. From his priestly ministry, his great apostolic
works were born: the Marian Sodality of Bordeaux (1800); encouraging Marie Thérèse de
Lamourous to undertake the foundation of the Miséricorde (1801); and the founding of his
religious congregations: one for women, in collaboration with Adèle de Batz de Trenquelléon,
the Daughters of Mary (1816), and the other for men, the Society of Mary (1817).
1. Vocation and Mission
a) Saint Charles Seminary in Mussidan
William Joseph Chaminade, the fourteenth and last child of the marriage of Blaise Chaminade
and Catherine Béthon, was born in Périgueux, France, on April 8, 1761. His father belonged to
the honorable body of “bourgeois of the city” and was a merchant in fabrics.1 The family was
very religious; four of the Chaminade brothers became priests: the second of the sons, Jean
Baptiste (1745-90), entered the Jesuit novitiate of Bordeaux in 1759, but when the Society of
Jesus was suppressed in France in 1763, the young Jean Baptiste Chaminade went to the
diocesan seminary of Périgueux. He was ordained a priest and earned the title of doctor of
theology; in September 1771 he joined the clergy of the seminary of Saint Charles Borromeo in
Mussidan, a village about 35 km (21.75 miles) away from Périgueux, where he became an
administrator and superior. The fourth child, Blaise (1747-1822), joined the Franciscan
1
The list of biographies of Fr. Chaminade is very extensive; the two fundamental biographies are Joseph Simler,
William Joseph Chaminade: Founder of the Marianists (Dayton, OH: MRC, 1986) and Joseph Verrier, Jalons
(Dayton, OH: NACMS, 2001), 4 vols. A good modern synthesis is Eduardo Benlloch, SM, Origins of the Marianist
Family: Notes on Marianist History (Dayton, OH: NACMS, 2010).
Recollects in 1762. Then came Louis (1758-1822), the twelth child of the Chaminade family.2
The little boy William Chaminade, with his brother Louis, began his education in the Petite
Mission, which was run by the diocesan priests of Périgueux. Louis, three years older than
William, went to the seminary of Mussidan, where his older brother Jean Baptiste was a
professor, to continue his study of Latin. In 1771, William was confirmed and took the name
Joseph, which he favored in his signature from that point on. The example of piety that William
Joseph found in his brother Louis made him want to continue his own studies at the seminary in
Mussidan, and at the age of ten and a half, at the end of the summer vacation of 1771, William
Joseph entered the collège of Saint Charles.
Saint Charles was managed by a society of apostolic life constituted by teaching priests
who lived under the Règles de la Congrégation des Prêtres et Ecclésiastiques sous le Titre de
Saint-Charles (Rule of the Congregation of Priests and Ecclesiastics with the name of Saint
Charles). On account of the Catholic reform by the Council of Trent, these priestly societies had
spread throughout France under the influence of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. Called
congregations of priests living a common life, they were formed of clergy united by bonds of
charity who, without making a public profession of vows, committed themselves to live the
evangelical counsels in the form of simple and private vows, which the superior knew about but
did not receive. Animated by a marked apostolic spirit, these priests dedicated themselves to
ministering to peasants (doing missions and catechesis) and to the teaching of youth; for this
reason, they were appreciated greatly by the bishops. Because they did not want to submit to the
stiff structure of religious life, which would impede their pastoral devotion, they gave themselves
either statutes or constitutions, but not a monastic rule; because of this, they remained secular
priests. All of the French foundations of this time were characterized by a missionary spirituality.
These spiritual and canonical characteristics are key to understanding the disposition of William
Joseph Chaminade as a missionary apostolic and the lay association and religious institutes he
founded after the French Revolution.
The seminary in Mussidan had been founded by a diocesan priest of the nobility, Pierre
du Barailh, in association with the priests Pierre de Chassarel de Roger and Jean Maurant. On
September 1, 1744, they signed the act of foundation. A seminary was founded that, as was the
custom at the time, accepted secular students as well. The new priestly company, referring to the
reformer bishop, Saint Charles Borremeo, wanted to place their missionary work within the
context of reform that arose from the Council of Trent, by means of preaching the Gospel and the
Christian education of youth, in imitation of the Jesuits who, through the apostolate of education,
brought back to Catholicism extensive zones of Europe that had been affected by the
Reformation. The major difference between this school and those the Jesuits established in the
second half of the eighteenth century was that this school was not established to protect youth
from Protestantism as much as from deism and the religious indifference propagated by the
Enlightenment. Thus, the priests who taught at Saint Charles had the title of missionaries and
were animated by an evangelizing spirit.3
2
Concerning the Chaminade brothers (Blaise, Jean Baptiste, and Louis), see Herbert Kramer, Chaminade Lore
(Dayton, OH: MRC, 1983).
3
Joseph Verrier, “Jadis à Mussidan,” in L’Apôtre de Marie, vol. 37, no. 390, pp. 12-17; cited in Philippe Pierrel, A
Missionary Journey with William Joseph Chaminade Founder of the Marianists (1761-1850) (Dayton, OH: MRC,
1986), p. 3 and p. 67, n. 6; see also Jean-Claude Delas, History of the Constitutions of the Society of Mary (Dayton,
OH: MRC, 1975), pp. 7-24; concerning societies of apostolic life, with private vows ordained to an apostolic
ministry, but without entering into the state of religious, which developed after the Council of Trent, see Jesús
Jean Baptiste Chaminade took charge of instructing young William Joseph in the
practices of the spiritual life. Having a professor with a tenacious, stable, and responsive
character and with good practical sense, solid Christian virtues, and well-qualified intellect,
William Joseph Chaminade advanced quickly in his studies and in preparation for the clerical
state. In the school year of 1771-72, being 11 years old, he received his First Communion and
began to prepare to receive the tonsure and cassock. A young clergyman, 14 years old, he was
received as an associate member, or postulant, in the Congregation of Saint Charles, sharing the
life of the professors. In November of 1776 he finished his Latin studies and, at the age of 15,
was put in charge of the lower classes of the seminary. At the same time, he began a trial period
for entering into the Congregation of Saint Charles, which culminated in his profession of private
vows, to which William Joseph Chaminade adhered his whole life as his unique and final
consecration to God. At the same time, from 1776 to 1780, he helped his brother Jean Baptiste
with the administration of the collège.
In the school year of 1780-81, he left Mussidan and traveled to Bordeaux with his brother
Louis, with the goal of finishing his priestly studies. The two Chaminade brothers stayed in
Bordeaux to study philosophy. They attended classes given in the collège of Guyenne, and they
participated in the formative meetings and prayers of the Confraternity of University Priests,
which was a group of theology students gathered by Father Noël Lacroix in his parish church of
Saint Colombe for the purpose of maintaining in them the spiritual fervor threatened by the new
thinking of the skeptics and libertines. Father Jean Simon Langoiran, professor of theology at
Guyenne and the vicar-general of the diocese, advised the Chaminade brothers to continue their
studies in Paris. Ordained a subdeacon by June 26, 1782, William Joseph and his brother Louis
resided in Paris at the Seminary of Liseux, which was run by the Sulpicians, in the building of
the collège of Laon. At the time, he was enrolled at the Musée de Paris as a professor of
mathematics. In 1783 William Joseph returned to Mussidan. He probably was ordinate a priest
on May 14, 1785, and after 1788 he held the title of doctor of theology, which according to the
custom of that time, was granted for fulfilling the two conditions of being a seminary professor
and having passed his university studies. This practice should not imply a contradiction of the
intellectual qualifications of Chaminade, because it is said, “The doctors of the seminary of
Mussidan could hold their own among the hundreds of doctors of theology in the Diocese of
Périgueux, who for the most part owed their titles to the universities of Bordeaux or Poitiers.”4
Near the collège could be found the shrine of Notre Dame du Roc and a hospital, where
the youngest of the Chaminade brothers was chaplain. Since returning to Mussidan, along with
his brothers, Jean Baptiste, director of the establishment, and Louis, prefect of studies, William
Joseph was the business manager. The management of the three Chaminade brothers elevated the
collège to its greatest splendor, until the property was confiscated and the school was closed by
Álvarez, Historia de la Vida Religiosa (Madrid, 2002), pp. 339-49 and Mariano J. Sedano, “Congregación,” in
Aparicio and Canals, Diccionario Teológico de la Vida Consagrada (Madrid, 1989), pp. 330-32.
4
With respect to the debated question of Chaminade’s doctorate, see Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, pp. 40-41; the
theological competence of the clergy of St. Charles gained the confidence of the bishop of Périgueux, Emmanuel
Louis de Grossoles de Flammarens, who, in 1785, had asked the Chaminade brothers to examine the writings of the
visionary Clotilde-Suzanne (or Suzette) Labrousse; see Simler, Chaminade, pp. 21-22, and p. 31, n. 7; Christian
Moreau, Une Mystique Révolutionnaire: Suzette Labrousse, d’après ses Manuscrits et des Documents Officiels de
son Époque (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1886).
the revolutionary authorities in 1791.5 At the collège, as professor and priest, William Joseph
probably taught math, physics, and philosophy and gave spiritual direction to students, helping
them discern priestly vocations and preparing them to receive sacraments.
b) French Revolution
William Joseph Chaminade was 27 years old when Louis XVI and his counselors convoked the
Estates General in April 1789 to find a solution to the bankruptcy of the national treasury. This
announcement awoke in all of France a desire for reforms that would put an end to the
outrageous fiscal inequalities between the nobility and the Third Estate; the clergy was left to
struggle with the different conditions of life which existed between the low and high clergy. The
first step of constituting this great assembly of the kingdom was to elect the delegates and
regional representatives of each estate and to edit the Cahiers de Doléances (Notebooks of
Grievances), in which were collected the petitions, which were to be brought to the attention of
the king and the Estates General.
These meetings of the three estates for the city of Périgueux and the village of Mussidan
were held between December of 1788 and January of 1789. Fathers Henri Moze and William
Joseph Chaminade participated as clergymen representing the collège of Saint Charles. The
representatives of the three estates of the region of Périgord met on March 16 in the cathedral of
Saint Front in Périgueux. Among the 240 representatives of the clergy there were three priests
from Saint Charles: Henri Moze, and the two Chaminade brothers, Louis and William Joseph.
The Chaminade brothers acquired their position as delegates from two elderly pastors who could
not participate.6
The Estates General opened in Paris on May 5, 1789, for the purpose of reforming the
system of taxation and eliminating tax concessions so the nobility and higher clergy had to
contribute to support the country. As these matters had to be voted on, there was a need to decide
how the vote would be taken. The Third Estate wanted to give each representative a vote, as
opposed to the usual system of each estate receiving a vote. [The “usual system” was retained.]
Having made this decision, the Third Estate abandoned the room and withdrew to the tennis
court where it declared itself the National Assembly. Members of the lower clergy united with
some bishops headed by the bishop of Autun, Monseigneur Talleyrand; on June 27, they swore
not to disband until France had a constitution. With this decision, on July 9, the Estates General
was transformed into a Constitutional Assembly, whose legislation would unleash a political
revolution.
From this point forward, events happened quickly: after the bloody day of July 14, when
the Parisian mob attacked the Bastille, a chill of panic shook the country. On August 4 feudal
rights were suppressed, putting an end to the class-based society of the ancien régime, and feudal
manors and castles in the countryside were destroyed in a fiery wave; on August 26 the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was proclaimed; on December 20, promoted by
Talleyrand, the decision was made to nationalize and sell the goods of the clergy to alleviate the
pressing economic problem, a change from how the state maintained the clergy and the expenses
of worship; a decree of February 13, 1790, definitively suppressed religious orders, considering
religious vows contrary to human nature, retaining only those orders dedicated to teaching and
5
[According Brother Timothy Phillips, SM, a Marianist scholar, there is no definitive date as to when the school
was closed.]
6
Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, pp. 75-86.
hospitals. All in all, the most burdensome law for the French Church came on July 12 of that
year, when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved.
The new code the revolutionaries of the new state wanted to give to the Church in France
completely changed the situation that this powerful institution had previously enjoyed in French
society. In effect, the Catholic Church was a fundamental institution in the France of the ancien
régime. During the monarchy of Louis XVI, France was the major Catholic country, which
meant it had a greater theological impact on other European nations—particularly when one
considers the flourishing religious orders, whose numbers fluctuated between 50,000 and 60,000
men and women. But, just as in society, the clergy comprised a diverse group: the bishops born
to noble families; set against them, the lower clergy cultivated democratic ideas; these clergy, at
the same time, were to be found in diverse canonical and economic positions: a third of their
members (some 18,000 priests out of 50,000 members of the secular clergy) received benefits
without bearing a pastoral ministry. The bishoprics and monasteries possessed incalculable
wealth and privileges granted by the political powers; the Church was imbedded in the state to
such an extent that the state interfered with the Church’s internal organization. This
jurisdictionalism was justified by the Gallican tradition, which defended its prerogatives before
the Holy See, appealing to the “ancient liberties” of the Church in France.
Using this ecclesial and canonical thesis of Gallicanism for their own purposes, the
members of the Constitutional Assembly intended a radical reform of the French Church to adapt
it to the new constitution of the nation, so that the Church would continue being Gallican. But
the parliamentarians, believing it was only a matter of disciplinary measures, in reality, caused
serious dogmatic problems: bishops and parish priests ought to be elected by the population of
the respective diocese or parish, including Protestants; in the case of the bishops, a papal bull
would not be necessary, rather the king would designate him and the archbishop would confirm
him. Consequently, all ecclesiastics who were charged with the care of souls and
parliamentarians became functionaries of the state and, therefore, had to swear allegiance to the
Civil Constitution of the Clergy if they wanted to keep their pastoral positions and continue to
receive their salaries. Secondly, the Assembly drew up a new ecclesial map, associating a
diocese with each civil department; this administrative measure amounted to the suppression of a
fifth of the dioceses. But this created the enormous difficulty of how to depose a bishop without
a canonical fault of heresy, schism, or immorality. On July 12, 1790, the Constitutional
Assembly approved the new law that regulated relations between the Church and the state. The
protest of the bishops meant nothing; the Revolution had been designed by a minority which
imposed itself upon the country from the moment it gained power.
Pope Pius VI sent the king a brief in which he asked him not to allow civil authority to
intervene in the inner workings of the Church. Louis XVI signed the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy on July 22, and it was promulgated on August 24. In spite of the protests of Pius VI and
the French bishops, on November 27 it was mandated that all bishops, archbishops, priests, and
all clerics in official positions, in order to continue serving as functionaries, swear an oath of
allegiance to the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and signed by the king, under
penalty of being deposed. In conclusion, in only 20 months, the French Church went from being
a powerful institution under the ancien régime to being constrained to choose between a schism
or a precarious existence, under suspicion, and about to suffer a violent persecution.
In the midst of the doubts and uncertainties of the clergy concerning the swearing of the
oath, on February 22, 179,Talleyrand consecrated the new constitutional bishops. Thus the
constitutional Church was born parallel to the Church in obedience to Rome. Immediately, Pius
VI in a brief, Quod aliquantum (March 11, 1791), declared those consecrations to be illicit,
sacrilegious, and invalid, and those consecrated suspended a divinis. A schism in the French
Church had occurred. On July 12 freedom of worship was proclaimed, and on September 13,
1791, King Louis XVI signed the new French Constitution. The Civil Constitution divided the
clergy between those in favor of and those against swearing the constitutional oath; the lack of
religious unity broke down national unity. The revolutionaries sought to restore unity by means
of coercion, persecuting the refractory priests. The successive laws promulgated by the
Assembly, the Convention, and the Directory treated the nonjuring priests as traitors against the
country, condemned to prison, deportation, and soon the guillotine. But these measures, far from
reconstituting unity, enlarged the internal schism; for which reason, in 1794, the separation of
Church and state was sanctioned. Religious belief would no longer be the link of national unity,
nor would the Church be a powerful institution protected by the state.
For William Joseph Chaminade, these were difficult years spent trying to save the
seminary. On January 24, 1790, Jean Baptiste Chaminade died. He had been director and
spiritual guide of the seminary since 1780. On January 9, 1791, the city council called the
professors of Saint Charles Seminary to swear the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy;
instead they refused to take the oath, and they explained publicly their motives. This illegal act
was the undoing of the seminary and school, although the city council tolerated it, because they
had no one who could replace the teaching priests. But in June, the first replacements began to
arrive. The efforts of the director, Moze, and the business manager, Chaminade, to save the
school were fruitless.
c) Heroic Exercise of His Priestly Ministry
In November 1791 Chaminade left Mussidan and went to Bordeaux where the vicar general of
the diocese, Father Langoiran, advised him to buy a small farm with a house on the outskirts of
the city. Father Chaminade bought the property of Saint Laurent, of which he officially took
possession on January 5, 1792; he lived there with his elderly parents. In this populous harbor
city he hoped to find better means of supporting himself and a place where he could exercise his
priestly ministry. This was the situation in which Father Chaminade found himself when the
military conflicts with Austria and Prussia stirred up patriotic spirit and the persecution of
nonjuring priests began, which gave rise to religious persecution in general; on July 15, Father
Langoiran was murdered by a mob; then, Chaminade had to hide. On August 18, the Directory of
the Department of the Gironde decided that no refractory priests should be allowed in the city,
and another national law (of August 26) expelled all refractory priests from the country. The
brothers Blaise and Louis Chaminade abandoned France; for reasons unknown to us, the more
youthful Chaminade brother decided to remain hidden in Bordeaux to exercise his priestly
ministry secretly.
France was full of political agitation; the Jacobin radicals had taken power. On
September 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly was dissolved, and the Convention was installed,
which dismissed the king. On September 25, the Republic was proclaimed, and January 21,
1793, Louis XVI was guillotined. The schism divided the French Church. To put an end to
religious disorder, then, authorities of the Convention intended to destroy the refractory Church
by force with persecutorial laws; the bishops and priests of the refractory Church were prohibited
to worship publicly, and they were persecuted. There were massive deportations and death
penalties. It no longer sought only to eliminate the Roman Church, but to de-Christianize the
country, pure and simple, and to raise up in its place a new establishment, as is shown by the
worship of the goddess Reason, for example. Father William Joseph Chaminade went into hiding
at the beginning of 1793. From this date to his exile, four years later, he exercised his priestly
ministry heroically in collaboration with Father Joseph Boyer, vicar general of the diocese, who
organized the pastoral efforts of the refractory Church in secrecy. In the Règles pour l’Exercice
de Saint Ministère (Rules for the Exercise of the Priestly Ministry), Boyer gave instructions so
priests could have safe hideouts and hidden oratories in the homes of faithful families, where
they were less likely to attract suspicion. The priests were supported by the action of the laity in
their carrying communion and messages, and in imparting Baptism.
In October 1783, the commissioners of the Jacobin Convention arrived and established
the revolutionary Terror in Bordeaux, where the Girondists dominated. They began 10 months of
persecution as the guillotine was installed in the plaza Gambetta.7 Of the 302 people guillotined,
98 were murdered because of their religion. To this period belong the most laudatory stories of
the young priest Chaminade evading the persecution of the revolutionary guards. As a result and
in error, on July 17, 1794, William Joseph Chaminade’s name was included on a list of priests
who had left the country.
The fall of Robespierre, after the coup d’état of July 27, 1794, brought a period of
relative calm. The constitutional priests were allowed to recover some of the churches in
Bordeaux, and the refractory priests were allowed to open oratories. The vicar general, Boyer,
immediately organized these oratories, and Chaminade opened one at 14 Rue Sainte-Eulalie. In
this oratory, he exercised the normal ministry of saying Mass and administering the sacraments;
he also began to meet with youth; perhaps, it was here that he first encountered Marie Thérèse
Charlotte de Lamourous, one of his best collaborators. At the same time, Father Boyer named
him penitentiary of the diocese, with the delicate mission of reconciling the constitutional priests
to the Catholic Church. He also was named penitentiary of the Diocese of Bazas by its vicar
general. In this mission, he reconciled more than 50 priests.
By the law of October 25, 1795, the laws against priests subject to deportation or
imprisonment went into effect again, and Chaminade was an outlaw again. France now had a
new Constitution, beginning from year II, and a new government; the Directory had succeeded
the Convention. The only difference in its treatment of the Church was—instead of being
guillotined—priests were deported, and Chaminade had to act secretly again. The fear of the drift
toward the right and the return of the monarchy, which had been instilled by the Jacobins, who
were supported by the Army, worked in favor of the coup d’état of 18 fructidor (September 4,
1797). Priests were required to take an oath of hatred of the monarchy and fidelity to the
Republic; by the decree of September 19 all of the emigrants who had returned to France had to
leave the country within 15 days, under pain of execution. Chaminade, who had not been able to
have his name removed from the list of emigrées, had to go into exile.
d) Birth of a Missionary Project
On September 11, 1797, William Joseph Chaminade received his passport to enter Spain. On
September 27, he crossed the border at Hendaye and arrived in Saragossa on October 11, the eve
of the Feast of Our Lady of the Pillar. This public expression of the faith moved him deeply, in
contrast to the situation of secrecy in which the Church of France lived. His three year stay in
Saragossa resulted in the decision to reorient his whole life to a program dedicated to the re7
During the Revolution it was called the place de la Nation, and before had been called the place Dauphine.
Christianization of France.8 During his exile in Saragossa, Chaminade experienced a spiritual
and apostolic evolution during the many hours he spent in prayer in the holy chapel before the
statue of Our Lady of the Pillar and from the multiple debates and reflections he shared with the
refugee priests and bishops of France also in Saragossa.
Directed by the archbishop of Auch, Monseigneur Louis Apollinaire de la Tour du Pin
Montauban, Chaminade was put in contact with Father Thomas Casteran, who was responsible
for the refugee priests in Saragossa. Casteran, vicar general for the Archdiocese of Auch and the
Diocese of Tarbes, maintained communication among the priests and bishops exiled in the city;
he had good relations with the Spanish prelates and was able to give economic assistance to the
neediest priests. Spanish law obliged the French clergy to live in religious communities under the
care of a superior; Chaminade lived with his brother Louis and some priests who had been
students at Mussidan; they were prohibited to preach, but they were allowed to say Mass and
hear one another’s Confessions. The exiled priests in Saragossa met periodically to reflect and
generate pastoral plans to reorganize the Church upon their return to France—the Church whose
plans and institutions had been devastated by the revolutionary storm. These meetings had been
promoted by Monseigneur de Gain Montagnac, a refugee in Monserrat, and they were
coordinated in Saragossa by his vicar, Thomas Casteran. In Monserrat, the Bishops de La Tour
du Pin, de Gain Montagnac, and the titular of Lavaur agreed to entrust to Father Saussol the
editing of Traité de la Conduite à Tenir après la Persécution (Treatise on a Plan of Action After
the Persecution), published in Florence in two volumes in 1800, and of which Father Chaminade
had a copy. The thoughts and lines of pastoral action outlined in this work had been brought up
in the meetings of the French priests in Saragossa, in which Chaminade participated. These
conferences and debates treated matters of the greatest interest to those who wanted to overcome
the schism in the French Church, such as the reconciliation of schismatic priests, the way to
resolve the problems stirred up by revolutionary worship, the goods of the clergy, and the
validity of the sacraments given in secret without witnesses or documents (particularly
Marriage). But it also concerned itself with how to organize the new pastoral strategies to again
evangelize French society. The documents of these conferences on mission maintain that, given
the scarce number of priests, the reevangelization of society should be confided to “educated
laypersons.”
In this manner, the spirit of the primitive Church in a state of mission was created among
the exiled clergy. They thought of themselves as missionaries, exercising their ministry in
unfaithful or heretical countries, and found their models in the priests formed by the reforming
thrust of the Council of Trent: Vincent de Paul, Francis de Sales, and John Francis Regis. This
mystery of mission and the new evangelizing strategies constituted the keys of the immediate
missionary activity Chaminade began upon his return to France. In the Marianist tradition, it is
here, in Saragossa, where we consider Father William Joseph Chaminade to have received the
inspiration for the foundation of all his apostolic works. But more importantly, all the previous
experiences of priestly formation and mission in the evangelization of youth through teaching at
Mussidan, the shock of the pastoral experience he received during his secret ministry in
Bordeaux, the many encounters and reflections and debates with other refugee priests in
Saragossa, and the abundant time spent in prayer before the statue of Our Lady of the Pillar
formed his mind in these years, resulting in an intense spiritual and apostolic development. In
8
Concerning the presence of Chaminade in Saragossa, see Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, pp. 233-62; and concerning the
development of his missionary project during his exile in Saragossa, see Pierrel, Missionary Journey, pp. 18-21, and
Eduardo Benlloch, Chaminade’s Message Today (Dayton, OH: NACMS, 2001), pp. 18-43.
this way, during his exile in Saragossa, Chaminade outlined a pastoral project or missionary
method for re-Christianizing France upon his return from exile, under the Marian spirituality of
the Immaculate Conception. This pastoral outline was like a charismatic-apostolic spiritual seed,
from which his successive foundations (the lay Sodality and the two religious institutes) would
sprout.9
2. Missionary Project for France
a) Return to Bordeaux
While in Saragossa, William Joseph Chaminade matured in thinking on his apostolic projects,
and on November 9, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte published a new Constitution that inaugurated
the era of the Consulate. As part of his general political inspiration, Napoleon sought
reconciliation with the Church and the normalization of the religious situation because he
thought it was the key to the pacification of France; to that end, the law of November 28 freed
imprisoned priests and permitted those who had been deported to return. By a law of January 7,
1800, the old oaths required of priests were replaced by a simple promise of fidelity to the
constitution. Perhaps being influenced by the advice of Louis de La Tour du Pin, the archbishop
of Auch, Chaminade decided to return to Bordeaux and was animated by an intense desire to put
his missionary plan into action after waiting all those years. Communicating this ardent desire to
his spiritual directee, Mlle de Lamourous in a letter of August 26, 1800, he confessed: “Courage!
Time and the years are rolling by. We are moving on, my dear Th[érèse]; we are getting on in
years, you and I; we are both of about the same age. Our bodies are wearing out, and as yet we
have accomplished nothing. There is question now of starting for good and of doing something
for the glory of Jesus, our good Master. Think it over for yourself; I will do the same.”10 In the
meantime, a decree of October 20, 1800, permitted the return of exiled clergy. On November 2,
Chaminade returned to Bordeaux accompanied by his brother Louis. In Bordeaux, the authorities
were quite tolerant; though, the only possibility of pastoral activity was the exercise of their
priestly ministry in private oratories. Thanks to his friendship with Marie Thérèse de Lamourous,
he was able to open an oratory in an apartment house at 7 Rue Arnaud Miqueu, the property of
sister of Marie Thérèse.
Either upon his departure from Spain or his arrival in Bordeaux, de La Tour du Pin had
entrusted to Chaminade the administration of the Diocese of Bazas, which had neither bishop nor
vicar because both had died. We know from Chaminade’s own letters that “the saintly
Archbishop of Auch obliged me, in a way, to accept the administration of the diocese. Due to my
sympathetic and respectful desire to be of service to him and still more to the love with which
God has inspired me for His Church, I accepted his pressing invitation and added this heavy
burden to the numerous occupations that the condition of the city of Bordeaux and the forlorn
condition of its young people, especially, had already imposed upon me.”11
William Joseph Chaminade did not intend to pursue an ecclesiastical career; rather he
desired to devote himself, body and soul, to his missionary project, which matured in his mind in
Saragossa; for that reason, he did not live in the Diocese of Bazas, leaving there three
9
This thesis is supported by Benlloch, Message, pp. 18-21 and pp. 39-43, and by Ignacio Otaño, Misión Marianista.
Proyecto Misionero del Fundador (Madrid: Imprenta SM, 1994).
10
Chaminade, Letters, no. 22 to de Lamourous, Aug. 36 [26], 1800; vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 60.
11
Chaminade, Letters, no. 25 to d’Aviau, June 19, 1802; vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 66.
administrators, and as soon as it was possible, he removed himself from this ministry, because
the diocese disappeared with the issuing of the Napoleonic Concordat on April 18, 1802. The
previous April 12, Bonaparte had named Monseigneur Charles François d’Aviau du Bois de
Sanzay (archbishop of Vienne before the Revolution, who had been forced into exile) as the new
archbishop of Bordeaux, and he took possession on the following July 25. Immediately,
Chaminade, after having given him polite information concerning his management as apostolic
administrator, presented his resignation as penitentiary of Bordeaux. He did all this because he
wanted to dedicate himself fully to his mission of the re-Christianization of France by the
formation of youth in the Marian Sodality.
It should be noted that Chaminade belonged to the multitude of French priests who
promoted the organization of the lay apostolate after the French Revolution, because they were
firmly convinced that the laity was capable of performing the apostolate more effectively in the
cultural and social contexts of the new times. Nevertheless, Chaminade was a pioneer in this
kind of apostolate. In fact, during the first two years after his return from exile, the vicar general
of the archdiocese of Bordeaux, Joseph Boyer, entrusted youth ministry to him. From the first
moment, his evangelizing project seemed well defined. In a single year he set up his program. It
began by reuniting the old sodalists of the Jesuits, Capuchins, and Saint Colombe, and on
December 8, 1800, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, he convoked the first meeting of the
Sodality in the oratory of Rue Arnaud Miqueu, and “on February 2, 1801, after two months of
reflection and preparation, the founding members of the Sodality made the following promise,
hand on the Bible.”12
In consideration of his services, de La Tour du Pin wanted to obtain some favor from the
Holy See; but Chaminade was only interested in and accepted the title of Missionary Apostolic,
which was conferred by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith on March 28,
1801. By this ecclesiastical title the Holy See authorized him to preach and exercise his priestly
ministry throughout all of France without being dependent upon the diocesan church structures,
but being under the jurisdiction of the ordinary.13 Chaminade held this title in high esteem
because it confirmed the approval of the Church for him to take his missionary project of the reChristianization of postrevolutionary France forward, protected by the canonical authority of the
Holy See.
Not only did he concentrate his energy on the reconstruction of the Marian Sodality for
youth, he also was interested in seeking a solution to the immense social evil of the multitude of
young women in Bordeaux who had fallen into prostitution during the revolutionary years.
During his exile in Saragossa, he had continued to give Mlle de Lamourous spiritual direction
through their correspondence. Upon his return to Bordeaux, Marie Thérèse de Lamourous
became one of his most reliable assistants in the work of establishing the Sodality, and Father
Chaminade encouraged her to take charge of the direction of the Miséricorde of Bordeaux.14 This
work had been founded by a noble woman, Mlle Jeanne Germaine de Pichon de Longueville.
12
Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, p. 279.
Concerning the canonical strength of the title of Missionary Apostolic, see Pierrel, Missionary Journey, pp. 31-41.
14
Marie Thérèse de Lamourous was born on Nov. 1, 1754, to a noble family in Barsac; Chaminade developed a
friendship with her during the days of the Catholic underground operating during the Terror, and he became from
then on her spiritual director until her death on Sept. 14, 1836. Her cause for beatification was introduced in Rome
on Nov. 14, 1923. Concerning her biographies, see Firmin Pouget, Vie de Mademoiselle de Lamourous, Dite la
Bonne Mère, Fondatrice et Première Supérieure de la Maison de la Miséricorde de Bordeaux (Lyons-Paris: Perisse
Frères, 1843); Joseph Verrier, Beatificationis et Canonizationis Servae Dei Mariae Teresiae Carolae de Lamourous,
Fundatricis Instituti Sororum a Misericordia (1754-1836), Positio Super Virtutibus (Rome, 1978).
13
She had founded two houses, the house of Providence for orphans, and the Miséricorde for
repentant prostitutes. The socioeconomic deterioration caused by revolutionary disorder and war
resulted in a drastic decrease in the commercial activity of the port of Bordeaux, which
impoverished the population; then, young women without families were forced into prostitution
to survive.
The Miséricorde began in July 1800, with a repentant who trusted Mlle de Pichon de
Longueville and asked for her help in learning new skills so she could start a new life. Within a
month, there were 15 women; the work was overwhelming, and she realized there needed to be a
person who could live with the filles and dedicate herself entirely to them. She thought of her
friend Marie Thérèse de Lamourous, who belonged to the Sodality of Father Chaminade, which
she also attended. Chaminade wrote a rule of organization for the house, and in January 1801
Marie Thérèse de Lamourous assumed direction of the 15 penitents living in the Miséricorde.
Marie Thérèse organized the house and sought work for these women to sustain the house.
Father Joseph Boyer approved the work and named Father Chaminade the ecclesial superior, and
Chaminade then sought economic assistance for the house from the women’s section of the
Sodality. On May 15, 1801, the Feast of the Ascension, Mlle de Lamourous conferred a black
cap on the filles and read their rule. Thus the Miséricorde was born. With the help of the
women’s section of the Sodality and the constant favor of Archbishop d’Aviau, an austere man
and ardent promoter of all the charitable works in his diocese, the Miséricorde managed to
stabilize and to give occupational, moral, and Christian training to the penitents.15
b) Marian Sodality
Formed by laypeople from all states of life and social conditions, divided into sections according
to profession and civil state, the Sodality was, for Chaminade, the work in which he realized his
missionary project conceived in Saragossa; consequently, he dedicated most of his pastoral
attention to it up to the foundation of his religious congregations, the Daughters of Mary (1816)
and the Society of Mary (1817).
What was Chaminade’s intention when he returned to Bordeaux to reconstitute the
Marian Sodality? In a revealing letter written to Adèle de Batz de Trenquelléon on October 8,
1814, Chaminade recounts that “Fourteen years ago I returned to France as Missionary Apostolic
throughout our unhappy land, subject, however, to the approval of the various Ordinaries. There
seemed to me no better way of exercising these functions than by establishing a sodality like the
one now existing. Each sodalist, of whatever sex, age, or condition in life, is required to become
an active member of the mission.”16
15
Beginning in 1813, the young secular women who assisted Mlle de Lamourous formed a religious congregation,
the statutes of which were approved by Archbishop d’Aviau on Sept. 20, 1813, and sent to the minister of religion,
giving rise to the Congregation of the Miséricorde; the Constitutions of the Congregation of the Miséricorde were
edited by the successor of Marie Thérèse de Lamourous, her niece, Laure de Labordère; approved on April 20, 1855,
by Cardinal Donnet, archbishop of Bordeaux, on Aug. 2, 1865, Rome gave a decree of praise to the Miséricorde; on
Feb. 17, 1872, the Miséricorde received the legal recognition of the French government, and on July 20, 1889, Pope
Leo XIII gave the congregation canonical approbation.
16
Chaminade, Letters, no. 52 to Adèle, Oct. 8, 1814; vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 130; concerning the Sodality, its precursors and
foundation, see Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, pp. 275-83; see also Joseph Verrier, The Sodality of Father Chaminade
(Dayton, OH: MRC, 1981), vol. 1, pts. 1 and 2; Charles Klobb, La Congrégation de l’Immaculée Conception de
Bordeaux (1801-1901) (a 127-page manuscript sent to the Marian Exposition in Rome in 1904; AGMAR 46.3.1);
concerning the birth of secular apostolic organizations after the Revolution, see Roger Aubert, “The Catholic
Upon returning from exile, the parishes of Bordeaux were in the hands of the
constitutional clergy and were doing nothing but administering the sacraments; practically
empty, they were not missionary centers.17 Chaminade had to begin to form new generations in
the Catholic faith, because the adults were practically lost after more than a decade of
revolutionary persecution and the propagation of the deistic ideas of the philosophes. Inspired by
the early Church, he wanted to form communities of laity with intense missionary ardor. With
the old sodalists of the sodality of Saint Colombe he reconstructed a new Marian Sodality. The
Sodality began on December 8, 1800, with 12 youths of Bordeaux, 11 of whom pronounced the
first act of consecration to the Immaculate Virgin Mary in the oratory at 7 Rue Arnaud Miqueu
on February 2, 1801.18 A new spirit possessed the new Sodality compared to those which had
been active under the ancien régime: the first being that it had as its purpose to reconstruct the
Christian fabric of society; a second difference was that the new Sodality included people of both
sexes originating from all the social classes and positions, thus it involved the new bourgeois
class.
One of the best explanations of the composition and purpose of the Sodality is found in
the letter of Father Chaminade to Pope Pius VII, dated May 26, 1803, written to obtain for the
Sodality the indulgences once attributed to the Bordeaux Sodality of Artisans. There it is said
that, “For some years the Church of Jesus Christ has had the consolation of seeing established in
the city of Bordeaux and growing considerably from day to day a group of young people of both
sexes placed under the patronage and bearing the name of the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin, Mother of Youth. Priests and laymen of mature age and solid piety have
particularly devoted themselves to encouraging and guaranteeing this salutary work, and we have
every reason to hope that by the grace of God this interesting nursery of servants of Mary is
called to propagate the spirit of religion and of fervor in the various classes of society which its
products are destined to enter eventually.”19
Chaminade enumerated all the components of this new secular apostolic body: its Marian
inspiration, strong spirit of community, deep formation in the principles of the Catholic faith, and
an intense missionary dynamism to multiply Christians. Recalling the frequent meetings of the
first Christians, the sodalists met weekly on Sunday afternoon. These meetings had prayers,
songs, conferences, and religious dialogues that were carried out by the sodalists, with a marked
apologetic and formative accent against the rationalist and deist cultural environment critical of
revealed religion, worship, and Catholic morals.20 The effects of these meetings in the city of
Movement in France and Italy,” in Hubert Jedin, ed., History of the Church (New York: Crossroad Publishing,
1981), vol. 7, pp. 227-39.
17
Chaminade, Legacy, vol. 1, doc. 153, pp. 670-82.
18
The first eleven sodalists who signed the act of consecration were Bernard Rotis (seminarian), Guillaume
Darbignac (a printer of playing cards who was preparing to enter the de La Salle Christian Brothers), Louis Arnaud
Lafargue (a merchant who became a de La Salle Christian Brother), Raymond Lafargue (cousin of Louis Lafargue
and a teacher), Jean Baptiste Estebenet (professor and director of a boarding school, who became a Jesuit in 1831),
Etienne Ducot (cobbler), François Tapy (student who became a seminarian), Pierre Capdeville (student who became
a seminarian), Jean Duchon (student who became a seminarian), Pierre Dubosq (shop assistant), Alexandre Dubosq
(shop assistant and brother of Pierre Dubosq); the formula for the act of consecration is kept in AGMAR 47.2.11,
see Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, pp. 279-82.
19
Chaminade, Letters, no. 26 to Pope Pius VII, May 26, 1803; vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 67.
20
Concerning the organization of the Sodality, its goals and apostolic methods, see Spirit 3, § 76-230, pp. 91-297;
Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, pp. 285-92 and 355-66; Benlloch, Message, pp. 50-59; for the originality of Chaminade in
Bordeaux were very great, and a new Catholic faith began to radiate out. The Sodality, then,
grew quickly. A year after the foundation there were 66 sodalists, and in the first months of
1802, the number was roughly 100. On March 25, 1801, the women’s section began with Marie
Thérèse de Lamourous and eight other young women between the ages of 16 and 24, and a year
later they had 60 women. During Christmas of 1802, a section for adult men began, called the
Fathers of Families. Also a branch of women was formed that was called the Ladies of the
Retreat. In three years, Father Chaminade had given birth to a foundation open to laypeople of
every age, sex, and social condition, which very quickly numbered 500 members. Since the year
1801 the association had a manual titled Recueil de Prières et de Pratiques pour Servir au Culte
de la Très Pure Marie, auquel on a Ajouté Plusieurs Cantiques (A Manual of Prayers and
Practices for Serving the Cult of the Most Pure Mary, to which Are Added Many Songs). A
number of diocesan priests belonged to the Sodality, and out of the ranks of the Sodality
abundant vocations arose both to the seminary and to other religious congregations. Among the
former sodalists who became bishops are Monseigneur Martial, bishop of Saint Brieuc;
Monseigneur Gignoux, bishop of Beauvais; and Monseigneur Dupuch, first bishop of Algiers.
Many priests of Bordeaux were sodalists, for example, two vicars general, Martial and Gignoux
(brothers of the two listed above); also Father Jean Baptiste Lacombe, rector of the minor
seminary, founder of small clerical schools, and propagator of devotion to the Way of the Cross;
Father Timothy Lacombe; and a founder of religious congregations, Father Pierre Bienvenu
Noailles. All these men offered important influences for the later expansion of the schools of the
Society of Mary.21
Chaminade opted for a lay movement of the masses, characterized by a strong radiation
of faith which would evangelize youth by assimilation into a large Christian community. The
evangelizing method consisted of giving the example of a Christian life in practice and
communicating the faith by contagion within the Sodality, creating, thus, an effective multiplier
of Christians. In this way, all of the sodalists felt as though they were in a state of permanent
mission. The difference and originality of the Sodality of Chaminade, with respect to many
others which appeared in France during this same period, was in not being specialized, but rather
in knowing how to integrate a multitude of pastoral tasks all directed to transmit the faith. In fact,
the sodalists quickly tackled diverse apostolic and social works in the city. Among them they
emphasized prison work, offering material assistance, moral help, and Christian values to those
imprisoned; weekly visits to the poor; working with chimney sweeps, consistently lending
protection, teaching literacy and catechesis, and providing moral leisure activities to the very
poor children of the mountain people of Savoy and Auvergne who descended each spring to
scour the chimneys of Bordeaux. The sodalists also collaborated with other institutions, among
them the work of Good Books, and others taught catechesis in the parishes. To these works must
be added the teaching in schools of children and youth by two sodalists, Arnaud Lafargue and
Guillaume Darbignac who directed a state-recognized school on Rue des Etuves. In December
1804, two de la Salle Christian Brothers came to Bordeaux to found a school, and Lafargue and
Darbignac took the religious habit of the Christian Brothers. The community of brothers was
adopting diverse methods in comparison with other specialized associations of the period, see Roger Aubert, “The
Catholic Action of the Laity in France,” in Jedin, History of the Church, vol. 7, pp. 227-30.
21
Klobb, La Congrégation, p. 79; these names can be found in the alphabetic table at the end of Joseph Simler,
Guillaume-Joseph Chaminade, Fondateur de la Société de Marie et de l’Institut des Filles de Marie, 1761-1850
(Paris and Bordeaux: Librairie Victor Lecoffre and Librairie Féret et Fils, 1901), pp. 773-83, all of which were also
included in the Index of Simler, Chaminade, pp. 549-67.
installed in a house near the church of Saint Eulalie, and Chaminade was their ecclesiastical
superior and the first spiritual director. Other sodalists, Alexandre Dubosq, Estebenet, Raymond
Lafargue, Crépin Cahier, Timothy Momus, Jean Thomas, Jacques Déjernon, and André Martres
met with boys to teach them the catechism and some grammar. With all this pastoral activity of
the Sodality, the oratory on Rue Arnaud Miqueu had to be moved to another on 15-16 Rue Saint
Siméon, near the end of 1801.
While the Sodality grew, the religious and political life in France began to change
favorably at the hand of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon sought the reconciliation of France with
the Catholic Church. Out of social and political necessity, Napoleon undertook the religious
pacification of French society by the Concordat with the Holy See of July 15, 1801, which was
promulgated on April 18, 1802. The Concordat recognized the First Consul and gave to him all
the faculties that the crown had possessed under the ancien régime; in exchange, the Church
obtained its freedom and public worship was legalized; though, the hierarchy was named by
Napoleon, the pope gave canonical approval. Therefore, the bishops, as well as the priests
(named by the bishop), swore an oath to the constitution; the churches which had not been sold
were returned to the Church in exchange for allowing the buyers of ecclesiastic goods to retain
the goods they had purchased. The new Concordat drew up new French dioceses. This meant the
disappearance of numerous dioceses. But there were no conflicts this time because the schism of
the French Church had ended, and the Church was now protected by the state and reinforced in
its prestige. With the protection of Cardinal Fesch, archbishop of Lyons, the period following the
Concordat saw the resurgence of the Church in this favorable framework, and new forms of
religious life appeared, in the form of congregations of men or women joined by simple and, in
principle, private vows.
On April 12, 1802, Charles François d’Aviau du Bois de Sanzay was named archbishop
of Bordeaux, and he took possession of his see on August 15. From the good reports of the vicar,
Boyer, d’Aviau understood immediately the evangelizing efficacy of the Sodality of Father
Chaminade; he fought for the Holy See to grant him the transfer of indulgences and other
spiritual favors from the old Congregation of Artisans, requested by the letter of Father
Chaminade on May 26, 1803, to which Cardinal Caprara responded on June 2, conferring
canonical approbation. In turn, on June 27, 1803, the archbishop of Bordeaux named Father
Chaminade honorary canon of the cathedral. Thus the complete physiognomy of the Sodality of
Mary Immaculate was achieved in 1804; this began, for Father Chaminade, an era of great social
and religious influence in Bordeaux.
On November 17, 1804, Chaminade rented the chapel of the Madeleine from its owner,
the widow Lafargue; five days before, on November 12, d’Aviau had named him chaplain of this
chapel. It was the church of a former convent of the religious of Saint Mary Magdalene,
nationalized during the Revolution, which had been used for diverse religious and profane
activities.22 This was the final headquarters of the Sodality where it grew in its number of
sodalists and the splendor of its ceremonies. Chaminade eventually put his private residence
across the street from the church, at 65 Rue Lalande; much later, in 1819, when he bought the
Madeleine, he lived in an adjacent house with a direct entrance to the chapel. But the expansion
of the Sodality did not go unnoticed by the Napoleonic police who, although they recognized the
Sodality as having good customs and order, feared its doctrinal belligerence against the
22
Concerning the Madeleine, see Verrier, Jalons, vol. 1, pp. 476-81; see also, The Chaminade Legacy (Dayton, OH:
NACMS, ), vol. 5, pp. 542-63; see also Jean-Baptiste Armbruster, The Chapel of the Madeleine (Dayton, OH:
NACMS, 2005).
rationalist philosophers and attributed to not a few members the tendency toward monarchial
sentiments concerning the restoration of the Bourbons; among them were David Monier, the
secretary of Father Chaminade, and young Hyacinth Lafon.
d) Meeting Adèle de Batz de Trenquelléon
In the autumn of 1808, a pious association of young women gathered around Adèle de Batz de
Trenquelléon was incorporated into the Sodality. The encounter of Father Chaminade with this
young woman of nobility is of great importance because it would be one of the strongest
catalysts for the emergence of the two religious institutes from the Sodality.
Adélaïde Marie Charlotte Jeanne Josephine de Batz de Trenquelléon was the firstborn of
the Baron de Trenquelléon, Charles de Batz, colonel of the Royal Guard, and his wife Marie
Ursule de Peyronnenq de Saint-Chamarand. The family lived in Chȃteau Trenquelléon, near
Feugarolles, Condom, and Agen. The Baroness was very intelligent, religious, and charitable,
and she educated Adèle in the Catholic religion.23
Adèle, the loving diminutive by which she was called in the family, was born on June 10,
1789. Soon after her birth, revolutionary events disturbed the family peace, above all, the
attempted flight of King Louis XVI on the night of June 20, 1791. This put the Baron de
Trenquelléon in a very difficult political and moral situation. In fact, the Prince of Condé
published a manifesto abroad that was addressed to the nobility that encouraged them to form an
army to free Louis XVI. Charles de Batz, deeply monarchical, decided to emigrate in November
1791 to meet the Prince of Condé in Koblenz. The army of Condé was defeated by the
revolutionary forces, and the Baron had to go into exile in England. In the meantime, the
mansion of Trenquelléon was on the verge of being assaulted by revolutionary bands, and the
family was placed on a police register. As a consequence of the coup d’état of September 4,
1797, the Baroness was obliged to leave France with her two children, Adèle (8 years old) and
Charles Polycarpe (5 years old), heading to Spain because it was the nearest border. On Sunday,
October 1, 1797, they were in Spain. They lived in Tolosa, and in the spring of 1798 the
Baroness and her two children went to Portugal where they met her husband in Braganza and
lived for two years awaiting the political developments in France. The arrival of General
Bonaparte as the First Consul reestablished political peace. The laws against the emigrants had
ceased to be enforced, and on September 12, 1800, the de Batz de Trenquelléon family
undertook the return trip. On September 23, they arrived in San Sebastián, where they lived for
13 months. At this time, the eleven-and-a-half years old Adèle made her First Communion on the
Feast of the Epiphany in 1801 in the Church of Santa María.
Because she was so vivacious and emotional, her mother taught her to contain her
emotions; from the time she made her First Communion, her mother noted a change in Adèle’s
character. She began to overcome her impulses and fits of rage, though she retained her natural
23
The critical biography on Adèle de Batz de Trenquelléon is Joseph Verrier, Adelaidis de Batz de Trenquelléon, in
Religione Mariae a Conceptione, Fundatricis Familiarum Mariae Immaculatae (Marianistarum), Positio Super
Introductione Causa et Virtutibus ex Officio Concinnata (Rome, 1974); see also Henri Rousseau, Adèle de
Trenquelléon, Fondatrice de l’Institut des Filles de Marie Immaculée, et son Oeuvre (1789-1827) (Paris, 1921);
Joseph Stefanelli, Adele: A Biography of Adèle de Batz de Trenquelléon (Dayton, OH: MRC, 1989); Eduardo
Benlloch, El Don de la Amistad. Adela de Batz de Trenquelléon (1789-1827) (Madrid, 1999); Benlloch, Origins of
the Marianist Family, pp. 57-60; Joseph Stefanelli, ed., Letters of Adèle de Batz de Trenquelléon (Dayton, OH:
NACMS, 1999), 2 vols.
vivacity. Her First Communion stirred up a vivid religious experience, in which she felt an
intense call to consecrate her life to God by joining the Carmel that was in San Sebastián.
In the meantime, on July 27, 1801, Chaptal, a personal friend of the Trenquelléon family,
was named the minister of the interior in France. Without difficulty, the minister obtained status
of residence for the Baron, who, on November 4, was able to return to France with his family.
The government returned to him the lands that had not been sold. The Baron no longer wanted to
be part of Napoleon’s army; instead he remained in Trenquelléon and dedicated himself to the
administration of his family’s holdings. In this situation, between the ages of 12 and 27, Adèle
grew up in the country and made short visits to her relatives and friends in the small towns
neighboring Agen, Condom, and Figeac. Adèle de Batz and her companions lived in the
characteristic rural nuclei, called villages, situated within the framework of rural life and an
agricultural economy. This was the life led by the great majority of the French people. Of the 32
million inhabitants of France in 1825, 22 million people lived in rural France. This farming
population was characterized by being part of the so-called culture of material, moral, and
religious poverty; it was to these rural people that the association of Adèle with her young
companions, still living with their families, dedicated themselves by teaching catechism and
elementary letters and by caring for the sick. Pastoral and social action was shared by the
bourgeois women and the ladies of the lower aristocracy, who were part of the beginnings of the
congregational awakening after the French Revolution.
Although Adèle belonged to the nobility, she did not have the education of the ancien
régime, which had been reserved for the nobles. Without comfortable economic circumstances,
the Trenquelléon family lived a life different, separated, and modest compared to its social class.
In this context, Adèle was educated in a more bourgeois mentality than an aristocratic mentality.
She has this in common with Father Chaminade, who was the son of a middle-class father who
was dedicated to commerce in the small town of Périgueux, and Chaminade himself was the
business manager at Mussidan. There would be nothing to separate Mlle de Lamourous from this
new social and cultural class—though of the lower nobility, she was the direct administrator of
her family’s agricultural properties and the sale of their products. The closest collaborators of
these three came from the bourgeois and liberal classes. Thus, all the persons who were involved
in the beginning of the apostolic movement created by Father Chaminade shared the same social
origins with the founders of similar religious associations in France. “All in all, the foundations
of the nineteenth century succeeded because they emanated, for the most part, from dominant
social classes and from the small segment of the working class which was semi-self-supporting
and on which the Church leaned until recently. That these social elite were, in another way, the
religious elite is not germane. Their success came at this price, because the religious
congregations took aim, at the same time, at complete spiritual renewal and concrete social
action.”24
Madame Marie Ursule de Peyronnenq educated her daughter in the principles of the
Catholic religion and in the domestic responsibilities of women. Adèle went with her mother to
visit the poor and the servants who lived on the family property. She learned the elements of
primary education at home, as well as practical matters like sewing, embroidery, and the
24
Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au Féminin: Les Congrégations Françaises à Supérieure Générale au XIXe
Siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1984), p. 301; concerning the formation of Adèle, see Benlloch, Origins, pp. 101-11; the unity of
Chaminade’s evangelizing project and a program of inherent social reform is the subject of the thesis of Andrew
Seebold, Social-Moral Reconstruction According to the Writings and Works of William Joseph Chaminade (17611850) (Washington: CUA Press, 1946).
management of the house and estate. Keeping her desire to enter Carmel, she cultivated her
interior life through prayer, spiritual reading, and the guidance of her mother. Nevertheless, her
parents made Jean Baptiste Ducourneau, a prerevolutionary seminarian, her brother’s tutor. 25
Ducourneau, 37 years old, had a very positive influence on the young Adèle. He wrote a rule of
life for her, in which can be found a profound spirit of religion, balance, common sense, and
nothing of rigorism.26 The rule consisted of a meticulous plan for her behavior and prayer to be
carried out through the day, which manifested a regulated and moral sense of religion in the
midst of bourgeois religious sentiment.
Monseigneur Jean Jacoupy, native of Périgord and friend of Father Chaminade, was
named bishop of Agen under the new Napoleonic Concordat. On February 6, 1803, Adèle
received the sacrament of Confirmation from Jacoupy. Her Confirmation was a deeply spiritual
experience, and she again felt the call of God to consecrate herself entirely to him. At the
banquet that followed the sacrament, Adèle became friends with the two daughters of Jean
Baptiste Diché, judge of Agen: Marie Thérèse Foy (who took the confirmation name of Jeanne)
and Agathe. Adèle and Jeanne formed an intimate friendship and both shared the rule of
Ducourneau. Thus, the Little Association was born on August 5, 1804, formed by Adèle (15),
Jeanne Diché (20), and Ducourneau (40). Jeanne recruited her three sisters, Thérèse, Lucille, and
Agathe into the Association, and Ducourneau recruited Rosalie and Adèle de Pomier.27 This
young group formed an association of friendship and prayer united by an intense correspondence
via letters and was animated by Adèle de Trenquelléon, who was convinced that the Association
was the work of God. Thus she wrote to Agathe Diché on June 24, 1807: “Our Society certainly
did not come to be by itself; an invisible hand has united us for purposes that are still unknown to
us.”28 Monseigneur Jacoupy knew of the Little Association and declared himself its protector.
Other priests affiliated themselves with it and became its helpers. At the beginning of 1807, the
pastor of Lompian, Father Larribeau, took the position of governor of the Association. With
Larribeau the Association received a new spiritual thrust and the enthusiasm among the members
grew, reaching some 60 members in 1808.
Under the spiritual direction of Father Larribeau, Adèle progressed spiritually along the
paths of prayer and apostolic work. She also matured as a person; she acquired self-control and
personal balance that, nevertheless, did not cause her to lose her personal qualities of openness
and frankness, spontaneity, optimism, and her many social gifts. In addition to maintaining the
Association, Adèle organized a small school in the mansion to teach the alphabet, catechism, and
piety to the poor children of the neighboring villages.
25
Jean Baptiste Ducourneau was born in Villeneuve de Marsan (Landes) on Dec. 28, 1764. Before the Revolution
he had studied theology but had not yet received orders; in 1794 he was on the lists of clerics who had left the
country, but without a notation as to his religious order; in 1812, having finished the education of his pupil, he
entered the seminary in Agen. Bishop Jacoupy ordained him a priest on Sept. 18, 1813, and made him an assistant at
the parish of Notre-Dame in the episcopal city; in 1820 he was made pastor, a position he held for 23 years, until he
retired in 1843; he died on Feb. 27, 1845, esteemed and venerated.
26
The rule was reproduced in Adèle, Letters, pp. 318-24; concerning the religious formation of Adèle during her
infancy and youth, see Teresa Castro, “La fundación de las Hijas de María Inmaculada (FMI). 1. Una muchacha
llamada Adela,” in the International Marianist Review, no. 2 (Oct. 1984), pp. 7-20.
27
The associates specified their obligations and practices of piety in a rule strongly influenced by Carmelite
spirituality, reproduced in Verrier, Jalons, vol. 2, pp. 67-70.
28
Adèle, Letters, no. 85 to Agathe, June 24, 1807; vol. 1, p. 99.
Adèle soon came into contact, in a fortuitous way, with the Sodality of Father
Chaminade. During a visit of the Baroness to an old friend, Sister Gertrude de Tréjet, superior of
the Hospital of Figeac, in the visiting room the Baroness met a young man, Jean Baptiste
Hyacinth Lafon, a professor at the Lyceum of Figeac in the school year 1807-08. Lafon was a
member of the young men’s Sodality of Chaminade in Bordeaux, of which he had been prefect.29
The Baroness and Lafon shared information about the religious associations of Adèle and
Chaminade. In this manner, from the autumn of 1808, a long and copious period of letter writing
arose between Father Chaminade and Adèle, in which both sought a way to integrate Adèle’s
association into the female branch of the Sodality.30
At the time they came into contact with one another, the Sodality of Bordeaux was at its
height. All the religious institutions of Bordeaux, the diocesan seminary, religious congregations
founded or restored, educational and apostolic works, were all efforts of the sodalists of Father
Chaminade. There were almost 400 sodalists in the male branch, and the female branch had
some 250 members. When Chaminade received the names of the 60 associates of Agen, he
incorporated them as the third division of the female branch, with Adèle as its head; he also
named Father Larribeau subdirector, under the general direction of Father Chaminade. From this
point on there began a process of mutual influence for Father Chaminade and Adèle. Under these
mutual influences, the group of associates became oriented toward consecration to Mary and to a
greater missionary dynamism.31
Sodalists with Private Vows
In the face of the refusal of Pope Pius VII to adhere to the continental blockade against England,
Napoleon invaded the Papal States in 1807; he occupied Rome and on May 19, 1809, declared
the incorporation of the Papal States into the Empire. To this plundering, Pius VII responded
with the explosive papal bull Quum memoranda, which declared excommunicated to all the
violators of the patrimony of Saint Peter. A rupture was produced in their relations as well as an
official declaration of conflict between the Emperor and the Holy See, to which Napoleon
responded by taking the pope captive in Savona and then in Fontainebleau. This situation lasted
until 1814. Although the Napoleonic police tried to prevent the bull of excommunication from
entering France, members of the Paris Sodality snuck it into the country. The bull was printed
secretly and distributed throughout France by the sodalists in Paris and in other cities. These are
29
Jean Baptiste Hyacinth Lafon had humble origins; born in Pessac-sur-Dordogne, he was baptized on Jan. 15,
1765, and died in his hometown Aug. 15, 1836; he was ordained a priest at age 62, after having been a deacon and
subdeacon for 39 years; Lafon was a tutor and a professor, and on July 26, 1801, was received as a sodalist and was
chosen as a prefect of the Sodality on three occasions, in January and February of 1803 and in July of 1805; for
conspiring against Napoleon by spreading the bull of Pius VII, Quum memoranda, of excommunication against the
Emperor for violating the rights of the Church, he was imprisoned and escaped; under the restoration of the
monarchy, he was a commissioner of King Louis XVIII, president of a society of Christian philosophy, apologist,
honorary canon of the cathedral of Saint Andrew of Bordeaux, Knight of the Legion of Honor, Roman count and
Knight of the Golden Spur; on the life and adventures of Lafon, see Joseph Verrier, “Jean Lafon: Le Responsable de
la Conspiration Malêt,” in International Marianist Review, no. 13.3 (Oct. 1992) pp. 71-101.
30
Only Chaminade’s letters to Adèle have been preserved; the first is dated fall 1808, and the second is dated Dec.
23, 1808; see Chaminade, Letters, nos. 31 and 32 to Mlle de Trenquelléon; vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 80-83.
31
Concerning the reception of Marian spirituality in Adèle’s association, see Jean Baptiste Armbruster, “Grâce à la
Congrégation du Père Chaminade Adèle de Trenquelléon Enrichit sa Dévotion à Marie,” in International Marianist
Review, no. 8 (Oct. 1987), pp. 28-38.
the sodalists whom Napoleon scornfully called “the Plot of the Altar Boys.” Among them was a
sodalist of Bordeaux, Jean Baptiste Hyacinth Lafon, who was a monarchist through and through.
From 1803, as prefect of the Bordeaux Sodality, Lafon had been corresponding with a
member of the sodality of Paris, Count Alexis Noailles, one of the more committed members and
the soul of the Catholic resistance against Napoleon. In the summer of 1809 Lafon took a trip to
Brittany by way of Paris, where the bull of excommunication had just arrived and where the
sodalists were copying and distributing it. Lafon brought a copy back to Bordeaux. The
Napoleonic police acted quickly; September 10, Noailles was arrested in Paris, and on
September 19 Lafon was arrested in Bordeaux. The police, fearful, sent a report to Paris in which
they denounced “a sodality of fanatics directed by a certain Father Chaminade.” The minister of
police, Fouché, sent a circular on November 4, 1809, alerting all the leaders of the police against
the Marian sodalities, declaring them enemies of law and order, and ordering they be disbanded
and their meetings not be permitted.32 Several days later, November 17, the police went to the
house of Father Chaminade with a search warrant; they seized all the rolls and documents; on
November 24, the Sodality meetings remained suppressed by order of Fouché, despite the
energetic protests of Archbishop d’Aviau. The Sodality remained suppressed officially until the
end of the Empire. At the Madeleine only worship was permitted, but the life of the sodalists
continued discreetly without public meetings.
Given its pious nature, the Association of Adèle de Trenquelléon and her friends was
spared the prohibition of Fouché. At this time, all the associates moved toward a more Marian
spirituality, under the influence of Father Chaminade, who had sent Adèle the Manual of the
Servant of Mary. In 1811, some associates in Tonneins traveled to Bordeaux to be received as
sodalists by Father Chaminade. And in 1813, Chaminade obtained permission from the Holy See
for Father Laumont—an associate and friend of Chaminade’s since their exile in Spain—who
had been in Agen since the last week of July 1813, to receive sodalists, also.33 In this manner, the
Association of Adèle remained fully integrated in the Sodality of Father Chaminade.
In the meantime, to maintain the sodalists of Bordeaux in this semi-clandestine situation,
Chaminade decided to form a more animated group of leaders who would dedicate themselves to
maintaining and encouraging the fervor of their companions; thus the State was born—a group of
sodalists from the men’s and women’s sections who were animated by a greater spiritual and
apostolic ardor and who asked to take private vows to the director of the Sodality to live a
religious consecration hidden in the world. This phenomenon was not new—around 1803 a
group of sodalists of the female branch had formed an association inside the Sodality to give
themselves over “with perpetual love to the most Virgin Mary.” This new religious ardor among
the Sodality members made Chaminade think of the possibility of forming a religious association
composed of sodalists who would live a more advanced form of Christian life—“religious
sodalists”—and would work for the upkeep and expansion of the Sodality.
This new form of religious association, with private vows and an apostolic mission,
constituted a hybrid between a natural lay group and true religious life. A true glimpse of the
new forms of consecration to God by the evangelical counsels, the sodalists with private vows
32
The entire story of the political conspiracy in which Lafon participated has been laid out in Verrier, “Jean
Lafon...,” IMR, no. 13.3 (Oct. 1992); and in Verrier, Jalons, vol. 2, pp. 82-170 and 193-95.
33
See Adèle, Letters, no. 192 to Agathe Diché, on July 25, 1813; vol. 1, pp. 201-02. Concerning the question of
whether Marie Thérèse actually met with Pius VII, see Simler, Chaminade, p. 209, and Verrier, Jalons, vol. 3, pp.
358-59, note 61. Marie Thérèse, herself, mentions the possibility of meeting Pius VII in a letter quoted in Joseph
Stefanelli, Mlle de Lamourous (Dayton, OH: NACMS, 1998), p. 196. See also, ibid., p. 210. She certainly had not
yet met the pope by May 23 (ibid., p. 223), and she left Paris on June 10.
shared characteristics with multiple new groups that were forming throughout France, which
were the beginnings of what would be called the “Congregational Movement.” The novelty of
this form of religious association with vows was a clear manifestation of the action of the Holy
Spirit in the postrevolutionary Church, which extinguished the previous epoch and illuminated a
new culture and society. The novelty of this establishment of secular sodalists with vows was
that they did not reuse the forms of the former third orders; although these were laypeople linked
to a monastic order, they also were religious who were kindling new forms of consecrated life;
because of this, Chaminade found it difficult to classify them. Sometimes they were called “The
Gathering of the Twelve,” and other times “The religious State embraced by Christians dispersed
in the world.” By using the term “State” and “religious State,” Chaminade understood that these
sodalists constituted a true religious congregation formed by religious living in society. He
maintained that “although dispersed in the world, these Christians believe they have embraced a
true state of life, in the order of religion and salvation, given that they have handed themselves
over by sanctifying all the actions and decisions of their lives.” Consequently, the profession of
vows appeared as follows in the successive editions of the rule: “Profession in the State will be
made by the pronouncement of the three perpetual vows of chastity, obedience, and a
consecration to the salvation of youth.”34 In every case, even when there is great difficulty
establishing the theological and canonical nature of this new form of religious life, the Marianist
historical tradition considers these sodalists consecrated with the private profession of the
evangelical counsels as the spiritual origin of the Society of Mary.
The members of the State promised to faithfully complete the exercise of their
professional obligations and, in principle, they had no more links between them than other
members of the Sodality. Little by little, they began to meet weekly and to say certain prayers
together. Some sodalists of the State began to live together as a way of more perfectly fulfilling
their consecration to the Blessed Virgin, just as they practiced it in the Sodality. It seems there
was a stable group of 15 sodalists, which was called The Society of the Fifteen. In 1816 they
were given a rule by which they were obliged to meet biweekly, to meditate and perform examen
daily, to obey the director of the Sodality for three months, and to find and form a disciple in the
Christian spirit. Father Chaminade thought this group of select individuals could be the
permanent ferment of the Sodality, “the man who never dies.” In this way, we find in them the
seeds of a new form of religious life distinct from the monastic orders of the ancien régime, prior
to the Revolution.
In the meantime, the political decline of Napoleon at the beginning of 1814 allowed the
Sodality to resume its public activity. On March 12, 1814, the duke of Angoulême (son of the
future Charles X) entered Bordeaux. The monarchists, among whom many sodalists were to be
found, seized the city, and on April 30, Chaminade reorganized the Sodality, which revived with
great strength. But with the return of Napoleon during the Hundred Days (March 1 to June 22,
1815), Chaminade and his Sodality were watched by the police. Father Chaminade was arrested
on June 22 and imprisoned in Bordeaux in Fort du Hâ. He was interrogated by the police;
34
Spirit 1, § 20-23, pp. 31-32; Simler, Chaminade, pp. 229-32; Verrier, Jalons, vol. 2, pp. 177ff; Benlloch, Message,
pp. 62-65; Francisco José García de Vinuesa Zabala, Relations of the Society of Mary with the Sodality-State
According to the Writings of G.J. Chaminade (Dayton, OH: MRC, 1977), pp. 56-78; concerning the female branch
of the Sodality, see Verrier, Jalons, vol. 2, pp. 50-53; concerning the Association of the Twelve, see Chaminade,
Letters, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 102-3; the documentation concerning the State is preserved in AGMAR 46.10, and the list
of those documents is in Zabala, Relations, pp. 203-4, note 411. Substantially all the documents are reproduced with
a commentary in Herbert Kramer, Venerable Chaminade’s Etat (St. Louis, MO: Marianist Resources Commission,
1974).
because of his Bourbon sympathies he was deported to central France, to Châteauroux.35 Finally,
Chaminade returned to Bordeaux; on August 15, he reopened the chapel of the Madeleine and
immediately resumed the meetings and activities of the Sodality.
Announcing and Defending the Faith
“The new sodalities are not only associations in honor of the most holy Virgin: they are a holy
militia that steps forward in Mary’s name to fight the infernal powers under the guidance of and
in obedience to her who will crush the head of the serpent.” Father Chaminade explained the
novelty of the Sodality in Bordeaux to the diocesan clergy in 1824 in this way.36 In these words,
we recognize the purpose and mystique that gave a charismatic body to the pastoral action of the
Missionary Apostolic and to the religious groups founded by him, the Sodality of the laity and
the religious institutes. In a synthetic way, we can affirm that Father William Joseph Chaminade
wanted to defend and announce the Catholic faith in modern times under the auspices of the
Virgin Mary, and to defend it from philosophism and religious indifference.37
The life, work, and thought of Father William Joseph Chaminade is reflected in the
turbulent transition from the ancien régime to the new middle-class order—seeing a Church and
a society in a Christian state move toward the secularization of the civil and political minds and
institutions of the liberal state, in the wake of modernity. Chaminade was formed by the works of
the baroque scholastics and in the French School of Spirituality, but his passage through the
university environment in Bordeaux allowed him to know the new ideas illustrated by the
freethinking and libertine philosophes. The young priest William Joseph Chaminade shaped his
missionary project to re-Christianize France, first in Bordeaux, during the heroic exercise of his
priestly ministry in the difficult years of revolutionary persecution and, later, during his three
years of exile in Saragossa, as a product of reflecting with other exiled French priests and as a
product of the many hours spent in prayer in the cathedral before the statue of Our Lady of the
Pillar. Chaminade understood that in a secularized society risen from the Revolution and of the
empirical-rationalist thinking of modernity, Christianity could not be lived as a social
convention, nor could the faith be lived as a cultural inheritance.
He knew, along with all French clergy, that after 12 years of revolution, followed by the
Napoleonic wars, with the disorganization of the ecclesial structures which had occurred, and the
growth of religious ignorance, that it was impossible to return to the way things were before the
Revolution. In this sense, Chaminade thought the Church, without asking for the support of the
state, could live in a state of mission, one that proposed faith and offered an example of Christian
communities that lived the Gospel in all the force of its letter and spirit. For this task, he needed
35
Verrier, Jalons, vol. 2, pp. 372-82; for the police interrogation in the prison of Hâ, see Chaminade, Legacy, vol. 1,
doc. 90, pp. 318-26.
36
Chaminade, Legacy, vol. 1, doc. 154, pp. 683-94.
37
This thesis is developed further in Antonio Gascón, Reason, Revelation, and Faith of the Heart (Dayton, OH:
NACMS, 2007); and also in Antonio Gascón, “Reavivar la Fe Bajo los Auspicios de María,” in Ephemerides
Mariologicae, no. 51 (July/Sept. 2001) pp. 155-67; a writing of Fr. Chaminade’s which traces the origin of both
religious institutes to the Marian Lay Sodality is his request to Pope Pius VII, on Jan. 18, 1819, in Écrits et Paroles,
vol. 5, p. 514-16; concerning the criticism of Christianity during the Enlightenment, there is the classic work of Paul
Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years 1680-1715 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990); for a
study of the apologetic debate of Chaminade with the religious thought of the deists see Juan Manuel Rueda Calero,
Guillermo José Chaminade y el Pensamiento Moderno: Crítica a la Indiferencia Religiosa (Madrid: Imprenta SM,
2002).
to form the laity and to make them convinced missionaries of the faith who worked in alliance
with Mary. These could not be isolated Catholics; rather they had to live in Christian
communities, as in the early days of the apostles, so as to make them capable of evangelizing a
society that had been thoroughly secularized.
These key ideas which inspired William Joseph Chaminade38 first materialized in the
Marian Sodality of Bordeaux, in those youth who consecrated themselves with private vows
while living in the world. At the same time, Adèle de Trenquelléon and some of her friends
desired to take religious vows. Out of this confluence of projects two religious institutes arose:
the Daughters of Mary (1816), in collaboration with Adèle de Batz de Trenquelléon, and the
Society of Mary (1817). In conclusion, the mission to multiply Christians, to form them in the
faith of the Church, and to make them missionaries constitutes the common thread of all the
apostolic works of William Joseph Chaminade.
Chaminade was a soldier in the army of apologists who defended the faith against the
philosophism and the religious indifference of the modern era. Since his first works with the
Sodality, he shared in his conferences and homilies all the theological and philosophical
arguments of the apologists against philosophism in order to defend the Catholic faith and to
instruct his sodalists in it. Chaminade writes, “I am so certain that we have found the means of
restoring Christian morals, of propagating the spirit of religion, and of opposing with strong
barriers the seductive and corrupting torrent of philosophism that I would never suffer it to be
denatured or even weakened.”39 In 1824, he explained that “the congregations have been
founded to cure these great evils and to repair the immense losses of religion.... Since the
beginning, nevertheless, they were taught inviolably to hold only to Catholic principles, and they
declared their opposition to the absurd systems of the philosophers.” And in the following year,
he writes that “heaven continues to shower its blessings upon the Institute of Mary, with which it
has deigned to inspire me, in order to cooperate in the regeneration of our beautiful fatherland,
which seemed lost to the triumphs of modern philosophy. (Note: This was the name given to the
philosophism of the eighteenth century.)”40 Chaminade considered the philosophical ideal of
modernity, as “the absurd system of the philosophes,” “the spirit of irreligion,” “impiety,” and
“the great evil.”41 He means that if skepticism is an “absurd” system of thought in philosophy,
then in natural theology it acquires the status of “modern heresy,” and it leads to “apostasy” or
guilty abandonment of the revealed faith and of its historic mediation by the Church: a thought
that is shared by the Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth century.
Chaminade’s missionary project is defined with greater clarity in the two documents that
expose his theological judgment on skepticism and his personal charismatic experience received
in Saragossa. It is a matter he treats in his request to Pope Gregory XVI, when he requests the
approval of the Constitutions written for his two religious foundations, and again in the letter of
August 24, 1839, to the priests who would be the retreat masters that year. In them, he
38
The five “key ideas” are detailed in Verrier, “Chaminade,” in Ambrogio Albano, ed., Commentary on the Rule of
Life of the Society of Mary (Dayton, OH: NACMS, 1994), pp. 61-106.
39
Chaminade, Letters, no. 188, to Rothéa, Jan. 25, 1822; vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 375.
40
Chaminade, Letters, no. 329 to M. Frayssinous, Apr. 7, 1825; vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 5.
41
Expressions that are dispersed throughout the writings of Fr. Chaminade, see Spirit 1, § 66, pp. 90-93; Gascón,
Reason, pp. 9-11; also, Jean-Baptiste Armbruster, L’Etat Religieux Marianiste: Etude et Commentaire de la Lettre
du 24 août 1839 (Paris: Saint Paul, 1989), pp. 132-33, affirms that the definitive theological terminology of
Chaminade concerning religious indifference comes out of his reading of the encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI,
Mirari vos (Aug. 15, 1832); we think the theological position of Chaminade appears to have been formed before this
date.
formulated his missionary project, inspired by Mary, against skepticism, creating a very personal
interpretation or updating of the old antiphon “Rejoice, Virgin Mary, because you alone have
conquered all heresies,” in the religious framework of modernity.42 Chaminade writes to the
pope:
If it had been permitted to me to come in person to cast myself humbly at the feet of Your
Holiness, I would have revealed to you the most intimate sentiments of my heart. I would
have said, with an entirely filial simplicity, how great has been my sorrow for such a long
time at the sight of the incredible efforts of impiety, and of modern rationalism and
Protestantism, sworn to the ruin of the beautiful edifice of revelation. To erect a powerful
dam to withhold the torrent of evil, Heaven has inspired me to solicit from the Holy See
at the beginning of this century the letters patent, giving me the title of Missionary
Apostolic so as to revive or to rekindle everywhere the divine torch of faith, while
presenting to the astonished world on all sides, imposing masses of Catholic Christians of
every age, sex, and condition, who, reunited in special associations, practice our holy
religion with neither vanity nor human respect, in all the purity of its dogmas and
morals.43
Against the system of thought born from modern rationalism and liberal individualism
that originated in the subjectivism of the Reformation, Chaminade placed the faith of the Church,
considered holy and of divine revelation. Continuing, he gives as the reason for the need to found
his two religious congregations the rise of rationalism and unbelief, which had impregnated the
minds and forms of life of all social strata and groups by means of public education, which was
controlled by the political powers. For this reason it was urgent to fight modern rationalism on its
own field: the education of minds.
I have believed before God, Most Holy Father, that it was necessary to found two new
orders, the one of virgins and the other of young men, who would provide to the world by
the fact of their good example that Christianity is not an outmoded institution. They
would show that the Gospel is as practicable today as it was 1,800 years ago; they would
challenge the propaganda hidden under a thousand and one disguises; they would take
over the battleground of the schools by opening classes of all levels and subjects,
especially for those classes of people most numerous and most abandoned.44
42
The request to Pope Gregory XVI and the letter to the retreat masters can be found in Gascón, Reason, pp. 11-18;
concerning the letter to the retreat masters, see Armbruster, L’Etat religieux marianiste, pp. 361-68, which contains
a study of the Marian antiphon Gaude, Maria Virgo, cunctas haerses sola interimisti [Rejoice! Virgin Mary, you
who alone have conquered all heresies]; for the letters, see Chaminade, Letters, nos. 1076-78 to Pope Gregory XVI,
Cardinal d’Isoard, and Br. Clouzet, Sept. 16, 25, and 21, 1838; vol. 4, pp. 292-96, and no. 1163 to the retreat
masters, Aug. 24, 1839; vol. 5, pp. 53-61.
43
Chaminade, Letters, no. 1076 to Gregory XVI, Sept. 16, 1838; vol. 4, p. 292-93.
44
Ibid, p. 293.
To carry out this task of re-Christianization, Chaminade founded two religious
congregations whose “main mission is to spread the knowledge, love, and practice of our divine
religion through education.” Father Chaminade concludes his report to the Holy Father by
attributing the charismatic inspiration for all his apostolic works to the protection of “the august
Mary.... For I am intimately convinced that Our Lord has reserved to His holy Mother the glory
of being the particular support of the Church in these latter days.”45 In this expression, we find
the charismatic nucleus of the apostolic inspiration of Chaminade: Mary has conquered all the
heresies of the past; she also will conquer this new heresy of religious indifference. In similar
terms he affirms this in his letter to the retreat masters. “All periods of the Church’s history are
marked with the struggles and the glorious triumphs of the august Mary. Ever since the Lord put
enmity between her and the serpent, she has constantly overcome the world and hell. All the
heresies, the Church tells us, have been vanquished by the Blessed Virgin, and little by little she
has reduced them to the silence of death. In our day, the prevailing great heresy is religious
indifference.... Consequently, the divine light of faith is growing dim and being extinguished in
the very midst of the Christian world.... It seems we are about to see what has been foretold, a
general defection and an apostasy really all but universal.”46
The Virgin Mary is the best way to form men and women of faith to be missionaries in
the task of fighting the abandonment of Christianity in this modern age of religious indifference.
For that reason, the sodalists of Chaminade made “a sincere consecration to the cult of the most
pure Mary”;47 this consecration “establishes a true alliance between the person so consecrated
and the Immaculate Virgin who receives this consecration. On one hand, the august Mary
receives under her powerful protection the believer who throws himself into the arms of her
maternal tenderness. She adopts this person as her child. On the other hand, this new child of
Mary contracts with this august Mother the most consoling and lovable obligations.”48
Consequently, Chaminade’s strategy relied upon the consecration of the laity of the
Sodality as much as the religious of both institutes for assisting Mary in her mission to fight the
religious indifference in the modern age, a battle which should be fought by means of instruction
in the truths of the faith, or “teaching the faith.”49
45
Ibid, p. 294.
Chaminade, Letters, no. 1163 to Preachers of Retreats, Aug. 24, 1839; vol. 5, p. 55.
47
Chaminade, Legacy, vol. 1, doc. 34, p. 66.
48
Teaching to the sodalists in the Manual of the Servant of Mary (1801 and 1804), in Chaminade, Legacy, vol. 1,
Doc. 34, pp. 66-67.
49
Simler, Chaminade, pp. 143-44; the documentation concerning the charismatic Marian-apostolic inspiration of
Chaminade is immense; one could consult Albano, Commentary, “Chaminade,” pp. 61-106; “Consecration to
Mary,” pp., 322-39; “Marianist Stability,” pp. 740-53; “Mary,” pp. 754-92; Armbruster, L’Etat; José Ramón GarcíaMurga, Jesucristo Hijo de María, Mujer en Misión y Figura de la Iglesia: El Carisma del Beato Guillermo José
Chaminade a la Luz de la Teología Actual (Madrid: Imprenta SM, 2000); and the numerous writings on the Marian
thought of Blessed Chaminade in Ephemerides Mariologicae, no. 51 (July-Sept., 2001).
46