Jules Chevalier

Jules Chevalier was born on 15 March 1824 in Richelieu, in the Touraine (Indre-et-Loire) in west-central France, into a family of modest means. He discerned a vocation to the Catholic priesthood and completed seminary formation for the diocese of Bourges. He was ordained a priest in 1853 and was assigned to pastoral work at Issoudun in the Berry region. Issoudun was then regarded as a difficult parish, marked by religious indifference, and it became the place with which his entire subsequent ministry was identified.

On 8 December 1854, the day Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Chevalier and a small group of companions began the community that became the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Missionnaires du Sacré-Cœur). He was the founder and first superior of the congregation, which was dedicated to honoring the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to missionary and parish apostolate. He also promoted devotion to Mary under the title Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, presenting her as the one who leads the faithful to the Heart of Christ. A shrine, later the basilica of Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur, developed at Issoudun and became a pilgrimage center associated with that devotion.

In 1874 he founded a congregation of women, the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, so that sisters might share the same spirituality and missionary orientation; Marie-Louise Hartzer later had a central role in that institute. Chevalier also encouraged lay participation through associated membership. In the later nineteenth century the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart accepted missions far from France, notably in Oceania, including New Guinea and other Pacific islands, as well as foundations elsewhere. The congregation thus became an international missionary institute while Issoudun remained its motherhouse and spiritual center.

Chevalier spent his remaining years at Issoudun as founder and superior, guiding the two religious families through growth and through the legal and political difficulties that religious congregations faced in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He died in Issoudun on 21 October 1907. He was not a bishop, pope, or patriarch; he lived and died as a diocesan priest who became a religious founder. He has not been beatified or canonized. He is remembered within the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart as their founder and as a nineteenth-century apostle of the Sacred Heart.