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Biography

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Daniel Brottier was born in 1876 at La Ferté-Saint-Cyr in the Loire region of France. After seminary studies he was ordained a priest in 1899 for the Diocese of Blois and served briefly in parish ministry. Drawn to missionary life, he entered the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (the Spiritans, also known as the Holy Ghost Fathers) in the early twentieth century and was sent to Senegal. There he worked in Saint-Louis and sought to develop educational work, though repeated illness associated with the climate forced him to leave West Africa after several years. From France he continued to support the Senegalese mission, including fundraising connected with the projected cathedral at Dakar.

During the First World War he served as a military chaplain with French infantry at the front. He was decorated for courage, receiving the Croix de Guerre and later the Légion d'honneur. He attributed his survival through the fighting to the intercession of Thérèse of Lisieux, to whom he had a strong personal devotion. After the war he remained engaged in the Spiritans’ missionary and charitable work in France.

In 1923 he was appointed to take charge of the Orphan Apprentices of Auteuil (Œuvre d’Auteuil), a Paris institution founded in the nineteenth century for orphaned and abandoned boys. Under his direction the work expanded considerably: vocational workshops and rural annexes were developed, fundraising was organized on a large scale, and a church dedicated to Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus was built at Auteuil as a spiritual centre for the foundation. Brottier became widely known in France for this social and educational apostolate among disadvantaged youth.

He died in Paris in 1936. Popular devotion grew around the Auteuil work and his tomb there. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1984. The Fondation d’Auteuil has continued the educational and social work with which he was identified, and his burial place at Auteuil has remained a site of pilgrimage.

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