St. Louis de Montfort

Who they were

Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort was a Breton priest who walked. Everywhere, thousands of miles across western France, refusing horses, preaching parish missions to peasants the age's elegant clergy overlooked, rebuilding wayside calvaries with his own hands, founding two congregations, and writing the two books that made him this site's household author.

The Secret of the Rosary is, three centuries on, still arguably the most read book ever written on the prayer this app exists for: roses for the mysteries, and blunt counsel about distraction and dryness that reads as though it were written for a phone era audience. True Devotion to Mary, on total consecration, to Jesus through Mary, was lost at his death and its manuscript found in a chest in 1842, and it has formed millions since. The motto of St. John Paul II, Totus tuus, is lifted from it directly. Opposed, expelled from dioceses, and by some accounts poisoned once by hostile parties, he preached until his body quit at forty three, mid mission. He was canonized in 1947.

Why people turn to St. Louis de Montfort

Everyone who prays the rosary and wants to pray it deeper. With St. Dominic, he is one of the devotion's two anchors on this site. People drawn toward Marian consecration start here.

How to ask their intercession

Take his own assignment: one mystery prayed slowly, as a single rose, rather than five hurried decades.