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Biography

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Jean-Marie-Robert de La Mennais was born in 1780 in Saint-Malo, a port city in Brittany, France, into a family of merchants and shipowners. He was the elder brother of Félicité de Lamennais, who became a celebrated priest, journalist, and philosopher and later broke with the Catholic Church. The French Revolution disrupted both the family's commercial world and the public life of the Church. Jean-Marie received his education in this turbulent period, developed a vocation to the priesthood, and was ordained a priest in 1804 after the Concordat of 1801 had begun to restore Catholic worship and clerical life in France.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century he worked in Brittany to rebuild Catholic pastoral structures. He served as vicar general of the Diocese of Saint-Brieuc and cooperated with bishops in the formation of clergy and the reopening of parishes. The revolutionary suppression of religious congregations had destroyed much of the old network of schools. La Mennais became convinced that the rural poor, especially in Brittany, needed a new kind of teacher: men who would live in community, take religious vows, and give both elementary instruction and Christian doctrine. This conviction shaped the rest of his life.

In 1819 he founded the Institute of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, with its motherhouse at Ploërmel. The brothers were lay religious, not priests, dedicated to teaching boys of modest means. He also took a leading part in founding the Sisters of Providence of Saint-Brieuc, who undertook similar educational work among girls. From Ploërmel he recruited candidates, wrote rules, organized novitiates, and opened schools across Brittany and eventually farther afield. He remained a diocesan priest rather than entering the congregation as a brother, governing it as founder and superior. For some years he collaborated with his brother Félicité on projects of Catholic revival; when Félicité’s writings led to conflict with Rome, Jean-Marie held to Roman orthodoxy and continued his educational work independently of his brother’s later career.

Jean-Marie de La Mennais died at Ploërmel in 1860 after four decades of directing the brothers. He left a congregation that survived the political changes of nineteenth-century France and later spread to other continents. The Catholic Church recognized his heroic virtue and a miracle attributed to his intercession; he was beatified in 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI. He is venerated as Blessed Jean-Marie de La Mennais, a figure of the Catholic educational revival in post-revolutionary France, and is remembered especially among the Brothers of Christian Instruction and in Brittany.

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