Claude Poullart des Places

Claude-François Poullart des Places was born in Rennes, in Brittany, in 1679, the son of a prosperous merchant household that had risen into the ranks of the local nobility. His father, François Poullart des Places, was a successful businessman and lawyer; his mother was Jeanne le Meneust. Raised in comfort, Claude received a thorough education with the Jesuits in Rennes and was directed toward a legal career. He completed studies in civil and canon law and obtained a licentiate, and for a time he moved in the social world expected of a young man of his class. Nothing in those early circumstances pointed toward the life of evangelical poverty with which he would later be identified.

In the first years of the eighteenth century he underwent a decisive religious conversion. He abandoned the prospect of a worldly career and resolved to become a priest, going to Paris to study theology at the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand. There he was deeply affected by the poverty of many fellow students who had genuine priestly vocations but lacked the means to finish their formation. After a period of discernment—during which he considered more established forms of religious life—he chose not to enter an existing order. Instead he gathered poor scholars into a community that would support them through seminary and form them for ministry among those whom other clergy were less willing to serve.

On Pentecost in 1703 he founded in Paris a small community of impoverished seminarians under the patronage of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary in her Immaculate Conception. That house, known as the Seminary of the Holy Spirit, was the origin of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, later called the Spiritans. Poullart des Places was ordained a priest in December 1707. He governed the young community in a spirit of strict poverty and availability, intending that its members be ready for humble and difficult assignments, including rural ministry and, in time, distant missions. The rule of life stressed trust in Providence, simplicity, and service to the most neglected.

His own priestly life was brief. Weakened by austerity and by the labors of caring for the sick and the destitute, he contracted pleurisy and died in Paris in October 1709, at the age of thirty. The community he had founded survived him, received fuller canonical organization in later decades, and in the nineteenth century was united with the Society of the Holy Heart of Mary established by Francis Libermann. Through that lineage Poullart des Places is regarded as the original founder of the Spiritans, a congregation that became widely known for missionary work, especially in Africa and in other regions of the colonial and post-colonial world. He has not been beatified or canonized; his memory is kept principally within the Congregation of the Holy Spirit.