Peter Coudrin

Pierre Coudrin (often rendered in English as Peter Coudrin) was born on 1 March 1768 at Coussay-les-Bois, a village in the historic province of Poitou in western France, in what later became the department of Vienne. He came from a rural farming family and received an education that led him toward the priesthood in the years immediately before the French Revolution. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the ensuing persecution of priests who refused the constitutional oath forced non-juring clergy into hiding. Coudrin declined the oath, continued formation in secret, and was ordained a priest clandestinely in 1792. Thereafter he exercised ministry underground in western France at considerable personal risk.

During the Reign of Terror he took refuge for several months in the attic of a barn or granary attached to the Château de la Motte at Usseau, where he celebrated Mass and administered the sacraments to those who could reach him. After the most violent phase of persecution receded, he resumed pastoral work in the Poitiers region as circumstances allowed. The revolutionary experience shaped a spirituality of reparation, devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and a resolve to restore religious life and missionary work in a Church that had been severely disrupted. In this period he met Henriette Aymer de la Chevalerie, a woman of noble background who had been imprisoned at Poitiers during the Terror and who shared his desire for a life combining perpetual adoration with active apostolate.

On Christmas Eve 1800, at Poitiers, Coudrin and Aymer de la Chevalerie established the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and of the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The institute was conceived as a single religious family with priests, brothers, and sisters, uniting contemplative adoration of the Blessed Sacrament with education, parish work, and foreign missions. Coudrin became the first Superior General of the men’s branch. The community later acquired a house on the rue de Picpus in Paris, from which the congregation took its familiar name, the Picpus Fathers. Pope Pius VII granted pontifical approval to the congregation in 1817.

As Superior General, Coudrin guided the institute through the remaining Napoleonic years and the Bourbon Restoration, when religious orders in France still faced legal and political constraints. Under his direction the congregation developed houses and schools in France and, from the 1820s, sent missionaries overseas, notably to the Pacific (including the Hawaiian Islands) and to parts of the Americas. He remained at the head of the congregation until his death in Paris on 27 March 1837. He has not been beatified or canonized; his historical importance rests on the foundation and early government of a congregation that later included missionaries such as Damien of Molokai. Surviving documentation from the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades is limited, and much of what is known of his inner life comes from congregational tradition.