Mutien-Marie Wiaux

Louis Wiaux, later known in religion as Mutien-Marie, was born on 20 March 1841 in the village of Mellet in the province of Hainaut, in the Kingdom of Belgium. He came from a modest and devout Catholic household; his father worked as a blacksmith. In 1856, at about the age of fifteen, he entered the novitiate of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools (the De La Salle Brothers) at Namur. There he received the religious name Mutien-Marie, combining the name of an early Christian martyr with that of the Virgin Mary. He was not destined for the priesthood: the Brothers of the Christian Schools are a congregation of lay religious dedicated to the education of the young, especially the poor, according to the tradition of Saint John Baptist de La Salle.

From 1859 until his death he lived and worked at the Brothers’ boarding school in Malonne, near Namur, a span of nearly fifty-eight years. He was first assigned to teach younger pupils in the elementary classes. Academic instruction did not come easily to him, and his superiors eventually gave him charge of drawing and of music, including instrumental music; he also served as a supervisor of the boys. He was not regarded as a gifted classroom teacher in the ordinary academic sense. What contemporaries later recalled was his patience, gentleness, and quiet fidelity to the rule of his institute rather than brilliance of method.

His life was outwardly regular and hidden. Witnesses described a man of deep personal piety, especially devoted to the Eucharist, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and to Saint Joseph. He spent long periods in the chapel, was exact in community exercises, and was remembered by students as kind and approachable. His holiness was of the kind lived in the daily round of a teaching brother’s duties—class, supervision, prayer, and community—rather than in public office or spectacular works. He remained a simple teaching Brother until the end of his life and never sought prominence within or beyond his congregation.

Brother Mutien-Marie died at Malonne on 30 January 1917, during the First World War. After his death, devotion to him spread among former pupils, local Catholics, and members of his congregation; pilgrims visited his tomb and reported favors attributed to his intercession. The cause for his beatification was introduced in the twentieth century. Pope Paul VI beatified him on 30 October 1977, and Pope John Paul II canonized him on 10 December 1989. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 30 January. He is remembered as a model of humble religious life and of the Lasallian vocation to the Christian education of the young, particularly of those whose sanctity is found in ordinary school and community duties rather than in extraordinary public achievement.