Peter Fourier

Peter Fourier was born on 30 November 1565 at Mirecourt in the Duchy of Lorraine, into a family engaged in the cloth trade. He received a careful education and went on to the University of Pont-à-Mousson, the Jesuit university that served as the intellectual center of Catholic Lorraine in the late sixteenth century. There he studied the humanities, philosophy, and theology. In 1585 he entered the Abbey of Chaumousey, a house of the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine. He was ordained a priest in 1589. The community at Chaumousey did not satisfy his desire for a more regular and apostolic life, and after further study and interior searching he accepted, in 1597, appointment as parish priest of Mattaincourt, a sizable parish whose religious life had seriously declined.

Fourier’s long pastorate at Mattaincourt became the core of his life’s work. He restored the liturgy and the sacraments, preached and catechized systematically, and made himself available to the poor, the sick, and those in moral difficulty. To undermine usury he set up a parish fund that granted interest-free loans. He promoted elementary instruction and sought to raise the level of Christian knowledge among both children and adults. His combination of personal austerity, practical charity, and persistence gradually transformed the parish, which came to be regarded as a model of Tridentine reform in a rural setting. People from neighboring districts sought him as a confessor and adviser.

Education, especially of girls who had little access to schooling, was a central concern. In collaboration with Alix Le Clerc, Fourier established at the close of the sixteenth century the Congregation of Notre-Dame, a community of women living under an Augustinian rule and devoted to the free education of girls of every social condition. The congregation spread through Lorraine and into adjacent territories and became one of the important teaching institutes of the Catholic Reformation. Fourier likewise worked to reform his own order. He gathered canons willing to live a stricter common life and to undertake parish and educational ministries, and in the 1620s this effort issued in the Congregation of Our Savior, a reformed branch of the Canons Regular. He remained a priest engaged in pastoral and formative work rather than a prelate.

The wars and diplomatic struggles of the 1630s, in which Lorraine was caught between its duke and the French monarchy, ended Fourier’s years at Mattaincourt. Remaining loyal to Duke Charles IV, he refused the oath of allegiance demanded by the French authorities and was compelled to leave his parish in 1636. He went into exile at Gray in Franche-Comté, then under Habsburg control, and there continued a life of prayer and ministry among fellow exiles and the local population. He died at Gray on 9 December 1640. Popular veneration followed, especially in Lorraine. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XIII in 1730 and canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1897. The Church keeps his feast on 9 December. He is remembered as a reformer of parish life, a founder of teaching religious, and a patron of Lorraine. His relics are venerated at Mattaincourt.