St. John Eudes

Who they were

John Eudes was a Norman missionary priest of prodigious range: decades of parish missions across France, and a volunteer plague nurse who, to keep from carrying the infection back to his community, lodged between his rounds in a great cask in an open field.

He founded twice. The Eudists ran the seminaries the French Church badly lacked. Our Lady of Charity of Refuge was something else: houses of shelter and restart for women wanting out of prostitution and exploitation, begun after a blunt laywoman told him to his face that preaching was cheap if the women had nowhere to go afterward. Its descendants serve trafficking survivors today, which puts him on a shelf with St. Josephine Bakhita. His deepest legacy is devotional: he composed the first liturgical feasts of the Heart of Mary in 1648 and of the Heart of Jesus in 1672, decades before Paray le Monial, and Rome itself credits him as the forerunner of what St. Margaret Mary Alacoque received. He was canonized in 1925.

Why people turn to St. John Eudes

Seminary staff and vocation directors, whose patron he is, with St. John of Ávila. Those who serve survivors of exploitation. And everyone whose devotion runs through the two Hearts, on First Fridays or otherwise, who is meeting the architect.

How to ask their intercession

For a seminarian by name. And for the shelters and the women in them, in his own register, which was dignity and no spectacle.