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Biography

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Charles of Mount Argus was born Johannes Andreas Houben on 11 December 1821 in Munstergeleen, a village in the province of Limburg in what was then the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. He was the fourth of eleven children of Peter Joseph Houben and Johanna Elizabeth Luyten and was baptized on the day of his birth. His family was devoutly Catholic. He attended the local village school and later a school in nearby Sittard, but he was a modest student and remained throughout life a man of simple rather than scholarly gifts. In the early 1840s he fulfilled a period of compulsory military service in the Dutch army. After his discharge he resolved to enter religious life. In 1845 he was received into the novitiate of the Congregation of the Passion (the Passionists) at Ere, near Tournai in Belgium, and took the religious name Charles of Saint Andrew.

He made his religious vows in the following year and was ordained to the priesthood on 21 December 1850. In 1852 he was sent to England, where the Passionists had recently established themselves, and he served in communities including that at Cotton in Staffordshire. In 1857 he was transferred to Ireland to the new monastery of Mount Argus, dedicated to Saint Paul of the Cross, at Harold's Cross on the outskirts of Dublin. That house became the centre of his life's work. Between 1866 and 1874 he was again in England, at the Passionist monastery in Sutton, Lancashire, after which he returned to Mount Argus and remained there until his death.

Although he never mastered English well and was not an effective public preacher, Charles became famous throughout Dublin and beyond as a confessor and as an intercessor for the sick. Large numbers of people came to Mount Argus to receive his blessing, which he customarily gave with a relic of Saint Paul of the Cross. Many recoveries from illness were attributed to his prayers during his lifetime, and he acquired a popular reputation as a miracle worker, while remaining personally humble, obedient, and devoted to the Passionist ideal of meditating on the suffering of Christ. He was known for long hours in the confessional and for kindness to the poor.

Charles died at Mount Argus on 5 January 1893. Devotion to him continued after his death, and the cause for his canonization was eventually introduced. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Rome on 16 October 1988. Pope Benedict XVI canonized him on 3 June 2007. His relics are enshrined in the church of Saint Paul of the Cross at Mount Argus in Dublin. The Catholic Church commemorates him on 5 January, the anniversary of his death. He is remembered especially in Ireland and in his native Limburg as a priest of healing and of quiet holiness.

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