Louis Brisson

Louis Brisson was born on 23 June 1817 in Plancy-l'Abbaye, in the Aube department of Champagne in northeastern France, the son of Toussaint Brisson and Savine Corrard. He grew up in a Catholic family in the Restoration decades after the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, when the Church in France was rebuilding parish and seminary life. After local schooling he entered the seminary of the Diocese of Troyes and was ordained a priest on 19 December 1840. He was assigned to teaching—mathematics, the sciences, and religion—and became closely associated with the ecclesiastical college of Saint-Bernard in Troyes, which he later directed. From early in his priesthood he cultivated a strong devotion to Saint Francis de Sales and to Salesian spirituality, with its emphasis on gentleness, humility, and the sanctification of ordinary duties.

In Troyes he collaborated for many years with the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, above all with Mother Marie de Sales Chappuis (1793–1875), superior of the Troyes Visitation monastery and a noted spiritual guide. She urged him to found institutes that would live the Salesian spirit in active work among youth and the working poor. Industrial Troyes employed many young women in textile workshops under harsh conditions. Brisson opened a hostel and workrooms for them and, with Mother Chappuis, founded the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales in 1866 so that sisters could educate, house, and protect these girls while combining contemplative Salesian prayer with teaching and social apostolate.

He then founded a corresponding congregation of men, the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, in the mid-1870s, and served as its first superior general. The Oblates took up the spiritual directory of Saint Francis de Sales and devoted themselves to secondary education, youth ministry, parishes, and, in time, missions. Houses were established in France and later in other countries of Europe and the Americas. Brisson remained based in the Troyes region, combining government of the two institutes with preaching and writing on Salesian themes, and he sought diocesan and then papal approval for the foundations, which was granted in stages in the later nineteenth century.

His last years coincided with the anticlerical legislation of the French Third Republic. The 1901 law on associations and the 1905 law separating the churches and the State forced many religious congregations to close French houses or send members abroad. The Oblates and Oblate Sisters were affected by these measures. Already elderly, Brisson continued to correspond with his religious and to reside in his native district. He died in Plancy-l'Abbaye on 2 February 1908, at the age of ninety.

The Oblates promoted his cause of beatification. Pope John Paul II declared him Venerable on 9 June 2003 by a decree of heroic virtue. A miracle attributed to his intercession was approved, and he was beatified on 22 September 2012 in Troyes; Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided in the name of Pope Benedict XVI. He is venerated as Blessed Louis Brisson and has not been canonized. The Oblates of St. Francis de Sales and the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales continue educational and missionary work in several countries.