St. Louis Grignon de Montfort.

The founder of the Montfort Fathers and Sisters (more precisely, the ‘Company of Mary’ [1712]and the ‘Daughters of Wisdom’ [La Sagesse]) was born at Montfort in Brittany in 1673 and educated in Rennes. He went to Paris in 1693 to pursue his studies, and after a spell in a students’ hostel where the lack of hygiene nearly killed him, he eneterd the Saint-Sulpice seminary and was ordained in 1700. He devoted himself particularly to the spiritual care of the poor and sick; he founded his institute of sisters at Poitiers, in order to improve the lot of the sick in hospitals. Much resented as an upstart outsider, the clergy of the Poitiers diocese contrived to get the bishop to ban him from preaching, but he appealed to the Pope who appointed him a ‘missionary apostolic’ and thus set him above such niceties. A great devotee of Our Lady, he was an organiser of robust popular missions of a kind which are now totally out of fashion. Some of his stratagems, however, were worthy of a modern roadshow evangelist: these included burning irreligious books beside an effigy of the devil dressed as a woman of luxury, and acting the role of the soul of a dying sinner being claimed simultaneous by Satan and the Guardian Angel. He brought back to the Catholic faith many of the citizens of La Rochelle, a notable stronghold of the Reform. His praises of Our Lady are in a very florid form which may now seem to verge on the embarrassing, but he also said that without the presence of Her Son, all reverence to Our Lady was in vain – a statement reinforced by the Second Vatican Council. He died in 1716, and achieved formal canonisation in 1947.