ST. PETER JULIAN EYMARD, PRIEST

Feast: August 2


 St. Peter Julian Eymard was born in La Mure d'Isere in southeastern France and became a parish priest in 1834.    Five years later, Peter Julian's faith journey drew him from being a priest in the Diocese of Grenoble  to joining the Marists in 1839, to founding the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament in 1856.  In addition to those changes, Peter Julian coped with poverty, his father's initial opposition to Peter's vocation, serious illness, a Jansenistic striving for inner perfection and the difficulties of getting diocesan and later papal approval for his new religious community.

His years as a Marist, including service as a provincial leader, saw the deepening of his Eucharistic devotion, especially through his preaching of Forty Hours in many parishes.   He fostered Eucharistic adoration throughout his life and founded a religious order of priest-adorers of the Holy Eucharist who came to be known as the Priests of the Blessed Sacrament.

 

The Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament began working with children in Paris to prepare them to receive their first Communion. It also reached out to non-practicing Catholics, inviting them to repent and begin receiving Holy Communion again. He was a tireless proponent of frequent Holy Communion, an idea given more authoritative backing by Pope Pius X in 1905.

 

Inspired at first by the idea of reparation for indifference to the Eucharist, Peter Julian was eventually attracted to a more positive spirituality of Christ-centered love.  Members of the men's community, which Peter founded, alternated between an active apostolic life and contemplating Jesus in the Eucharist.   He and Marguerite Guillot founded the women's Congregation of the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament.

 

Peter Julian Eymard was beatified in 1925 and canonized in 1962, one day after Vatican II's first session ended.

                  Excerpted from the Saint of the Day, Leonard Foley, O.F.M.

 

 

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