Louis de Montfort

Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort was born on 31 January 1673 at Montfort-sur-Meu in Brittany, in the Kingdom of France, the eldest surviving child of Jean-Baptiste Grignion, a notary, and Jeanne Robert Grignion. He was baptized the same day. He later took the additional name Marie at confirmation and styled himself Louis-Marie de Montfort after his birthplace. He received his early education from the Jesuits at the College of Saint Thomas Becket in Rennes, where he developed a strong interior life, a love of the poor, and a desire for the priesthood. Even as a student he was known for giving away food and clothing and for a growing devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In 1693 he went to Paris to prepare for ordination, traveling largely on foot and stripping himself of possessions along the way. He entered the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice and was ordained a priest in June 1700. After a short and difficult chaplaincy at the general hospital of Poitiers, he turned to itinerant preaching. For the remaining years of his life he conducted popular missions across western France, especially in Brittany, Poitou, and the Vendée, using processions, hymns of his own composition, the rosary, and dramatic appeals to conversion. His methods and his uncompromising opposition to Jansenism and to worldly clergy earned him both large crowds and repeated restrictions from some bishops, who withdrew his faculties to preach in their dioceses. He was also received into the Third Order of Saint Dominic.

Montfort’s spirituality centered on what he called true devotion to Mary: a total consecration of oneself to Jesus Christ through the Blessed Virgin. His principal treatise on the subject, written in the early eighteenth century, was lost after his death and only rediscovered in 1842; it later became one of the most influential Marian texts in modern Catholicism. He also wrote The Secret of the Rosary, The Love of Eternal Wisdom, Letter to the Friends of the Cross, and numerous hymns. He regarded the rosary as a school of contemplation and a means of popular catechesis.

Toward the end of his life he organized two religious families to continue his work: the Company of Mary (the Montfort Missionaries) for priests and brothers dedicated to itinerant preaching, and, with Marie-Louise Trichet, the Daughters of Wisdom, who served the poor and the sick. The Brothers of Saint Gabriel later developed from the same spiritual family. Exhausted by ceaseless travel and austerity, he died at Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre on 28 April 1716 at the age of forty-three. He was buried there; his tomb became a place of pilgrimage and is now in the basilica that bears his name.

Devotion to Montfort grew through the nineteenth century as his writings circulated more widely. Pope Leo XIII beatified him on 22 January 1888. Pope Pius XII canonized him on 20 July 1947. His liturgical feast is kept on 28 April. Subsequent popes, notably John Paul II, whose motto Totus Tuus was drawn from Montfort’s formula of consecration, have recommended his Marian doctrine. He is invoked as a patron of preachers and of the congregations he founded.