Saint Louis de Montfort and his “short, perfect and sure way” to Christ

Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716) is best known today as the author of the spiritual classics True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and The Secret of the Rosary. However, Louis de Montfort probably never thought of himself as a writer at all. Instead, he believed God called him to become a missionary priest.

Louis was a devout boy and an excellent student. Discerning a call to the priesthood at a young age, he left his hometown of Montfort-sur-Meu to study in a minor seminary in Rennes when he was twelve years old. At twenty, he wanted to complete his studies at the famous seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, but he didn’t have enough money. A wealthy benefactor offered to pay for his education, so Louis traveled all the way to Paris on foot. Along the way, the generous young man gave away all his money and possessions to the beggars he encountered.

When he arrived in Paris penniless, Louis discovered that his benefactor no longer had enough money to support him. The idea of giving up his priestly vocation did not appear to cross Louis’ mind. Instead, he attended classes at the Sorbonne University while cheerfully living in cheap boarding houses. After recovering from a serious illness, he tried to continue his studies. Another seminary agreed to accept him, and Louis studied at Little Saint-Sulpice, where he also served as the seminary’s librarian.

In terms of intellectual formation, the situation was perfect. Louis learned a great deal from his professors and his coursework, and he also had access to the works of many spiritual writers in the seminary library. Over time, he developed his own eclectic spirituality based on his daily reading of the Bible, writings from the French school of spirituality, and the personal witness of the Dominicans, Jesuits, Oratorians, and Sulpicians he encountered.

But his time in seminary was also a period of trial because of the ridicule he endured from his brother seminarians and even many professors.

It’s not hard to see why they disliked Louis. He dressed shabbily, took on mortifications far beyond those required by his superiors, prayed the Rosary with the devotion of a simple peasant, and was constantly looking for ways to serve the poor. The other seminarians, however, were looking forward to living comfortable, respectable lives as priests, not becoming ascetics.

Louis already possessed one key ingredient for sainthood: he diligently tried to accept all the crosses, mockery, and setbacks he encountered in life—such as resentment from other priests—as gifts from God.

On June 5, 1700, Louis de Montfort was ordained a priest. But he was never an ordinary priest.

Ordinary priests go where their bishop sends them. Louis immediately walked all the way to Rome to ask the pope for his advice about how to live his priestly vocation. As Louis poured out his heart to the vicar of Christ, Pope Clement XI apparently recognized something extraordinary in the young Frenchman. He told Louis to set aside his plans of becoming a missionary priest in a faraway country and told him to instead “renew the Church [in France] by the proclamation of the baptismal consecration to the Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, Jesus, the Son of Mary.”¹

Louis obeyed and walked back to France to start his priestly ministry.

Louis started by caring for the sick at a run-down hospital. Initially, the hospital staff was delighted with the new priest, who said Mass in the hospital chapel, preached to the sick, and heard confessions. But he also fed patients, washed dishes, and cleaned bedpans, and he refused to accept any pay for his work. Why did the hospital superiors eventually ask the young priest to leave? Apparently because it was easier for them to get rid of Louis than to change their own lives and imitate his example.

That’s why Louis began walking from town to town, traveling on foot and wearing a patched cassock and worn-out boots. He had loved to walk in the fields and woods as a boy, and he still loved hiking through the French countryside as he traveled to remote villages, despite bad weather and hunger. For him, poverty was a friend, not an enemy. It is estimated that Louis covered several thousand miles as he crisscrossed France during his sixteen years as a priest.

Louis also had the heart of an artist. As a boy, he drew for the pleasure of it. As a hungry student, he sometimes painted pictures and carved statues to make money. As a priest, he used these talents to beautify churches during parish missions and inspire fallen-away Catholics to return. He composed songs with his own music and lyrics, and he used these canticles to catechize his listeners and help them live lives of virtue.

Louis’ father had a terrible temper, and Louis himself was also tempted to anger. But through prayer, trust in God, and self-discipline, Louis seriously endeavored to conquer that weakness. He was remarkably gentle with his penitents, and he brought about many conversions from the unlikeliest of places—such as brothels—by simply speaking to sinners about God’s forgiveness and ignoring the personal insults that were hurled at him. However, when people blasphemed in his presence, Louis’ temper would flare. Sometimes that led to fistfights.

Louis probably never meant to travel so much. However, while his zeal rekindled the faith in many listeners, it also turned some people into hardened enemies. Invariably, such people would complain to the local bishop, and then the bishop would tell Louis that he was no longer permitted to say Mass in his diocese. At that point, Louis would obediently pick up his meager possessions and start walking toward another town in another diocese.

Not everyone misunderstood Louis’ unorthodox approach. As a young woman, Blessed Marie Louise Trichet (1684-1759) recognized that Louis was a kindred spirit and began caring for the sick while under his direction. Eventually, she became the superior of his order of religious sisters, the Daughters of Wisdom, and she cared for the poor and sick until her death. In addition to the many people who were converted by Louis’ sermons and personal witness, many others claimed to be healed by the holy man. A few men began following Louis as well, leading to the founding of the Company of Mary, now known as the Montfort Missionaries.

The Montfort Missionaries are a missionary order of priests and religious brothers currently serving all over the world, and they promote Saint Louis’ writings. Two of the timeless themes at the heart of Louis’ works are the Cross of Christ and the Blessed Mother. Summarizing his theology greatly, Louis reminded his listeners that crosses are not curses but are great blessings, gifts from God and treasures from heaven. He also encouraged people to desire to become “slaves of Mary”, for, as he explained, those who seek to follow in her footsteps of perfect, loving obedience to God also become “slaves of Christ”.

In his day, Louis made these teachings very practical. For example, in many villages, he led the people in building calvaries—replicas of the hill on which our Savior died. As the villagers became more involved in each building project, Christ’s Crucifixion and Christ Himself would become more real to them. Tragically, local leaders repeatedly dismantled or destroyed many of these calvaries. But they could not stop Louis from convincing people to love and pray the Rosary, which taught them to love the Son of God and His Mother.

But True Devotion and all the other writings of Saint Louis might have been lost forever. After Louis’ death, a devoted Catholic placed Louis’ writings in a chest and buried the chest in a field near Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, France. This action prevented them from being destroyed completely during the French Revolution. More than a century later, on April 29, 1842, that chest was rediscovered by an apparent miracle.

Louis’ writings have inspired priests, religious, and the laity ever since. His works have been publicly praised by Popes Pius XII and Paul VI, and Pope John Paul II wrote that “reading [Louis’ classic, True Devotion, as a young man] … was to be a turning point in my life.”²

The most famous of Saint Louis’ devotions is the practice of consecrating oneself to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and he wrote that, “This devotion is a smooth, short, perfect, and sure way of attaining union with our Lord.”³ How does one go about doing this? Fortunately, there are many recent books to help us. Saint Louis de Montfort himself explains why Christians should seek to become “slaves of Christ by becoming slaves of Mary” in words that are simple enough for a child to understand yet profound enough for him—we can hope—to someday be declared a Doctor of the Church:

As all perfection consists in our being conformed, united and consecrated to Jesus it naturally follows that the most perfect of all devotions is that which conforms, unites, and consecrates us most completely to Jesus. Now of all God’s creatures Mary is the most conformed to Jesus. It therefore follows that, of all devotions, devotion to her makes for the most effective consecration and conformity to him. The more one is consecrated to Mary, the more one is consecrated to Jesus.⁴

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