Frédéric Janssoone

Frédéric Janssoone was born on 19 November 1838 in Ghyvelde, a village in French Flanders in the Nord department of northern France, near the Belgian border. He was the youngest of thirteen children of the farmer Pierre-Antoine Janssoone and Marie-Isabelle Bollengier. The household was devout and of modest means. His father died when Frédéric was nine, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. As a youth he received a basic local education and then worked to help support his mother and siblings, including a period as a traveling salesman. Those early years of labor and loss did not erase a religious vocation formed in a Catholic home.

He entered the Order of Friars Minor as a young man, completed the novitiate and clerical studies, and was ordained a priest. The Franciscans assigned him to the Custody of the Holy Land, their historic mission with care of the principal Christian sanctuaries in Palestine and Egypt. For a substantial period in the later nineteenth century he lived and worked in that region, serving in Franciscan houses in Cairo and Jerusalem, assisting pilgrims, and holding various offices within the Custody. The years in the East marked his spirituality, especially his devotion to the Passion of Christ and to the Virgin Mary, and they prepared him for later work as a preacher and promoter of shrines.

In the 1880s the order sought to restore a Franciscan presence in Canada, from which the friars had been absent since the eighteenth century. Janssoone was sent to Quebec, first on a temporary mission connected with the Holy Land and later to remain. He became a well-known itinerant preacher, giving parish missions, retreats, and conferences across Quebec and elsewhere in Canada. He took a leading part in the growth of the shrine of Notre-Dame-du-Cap at Cap-de-la-Madeleine, near Trois-Rivières, which developed into a major Marian pilgrimage site. He also worked to revive the Secular Franciscan Order among the laity. Contemporaries knew him as Père Frédéric and regarded him as a man of prayer, simplicity, and tireless apostolic energy. His later years were based with the Franciscan communities in Montreal and the Trois-Rivières region.

He died in Montreal on 4 August 1916. Popular devotion to him continued after his death. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 25 September 1988. His feast is observed on 5 August. He has not been canonized. He remains a significant figure in the religious history of Quebec and in the modern restoration of the Franciscans in Canada.