St. John Eudes (1601-1680)
St. John Eudes was one of the outstanding figures of the counter-reformation in France. Born at Ri, near Argentan, he attended the Jesuit college in Caen, studied for the priesthood at the Paris Oratory and was ordained in 1625. His first labors as a priest took place among the victims of the plague that was then ravaging his native Normandy. He was much influenced by Berulle, founder of the French Oratory and 'Apostle of the Incarnate Word', but left the Oratorians in 1643 to establish the Society of Jesus and Mary, a congregation of secular clergy familiarly known as the Eudists, whose special task was to be the education of priests and the giving of missions. A great preacher himself (during the course of his life he preached well over a hundred missions all over France), Eudes had recognized the people's need for good pastors. He had already (1641) founded the women's congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge, for the spiritual care of fallen women. From this foundation the Good Shepherd order subsequently sprang.
But of all his activities the one that has perhaps had the most widespread influence in the church as a whole is his foundation of the public devotion to the Sacred Heart, an achievement which until the early years of this century was attributed principally to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the Visitation and the Society of Jesus. The obscurity which for more than two centuries surrounded Eudes's priority in this field is attributed by Bremond in his magistral Histoire litteraire du sentiment religieux en France to the nefarious activities of the Jansenists, whose hostility Eudes incurred by his steadfast opposition to their harsh and narrow conception of a Christ who dies only for a small number of predestined elect. The Eudists as a whole were never tainted with Jansenism and did much to combat its influence. Eudes composed the mass and office of the Sacred Heart in 1668-9, and a feast of the Sacred Heart was first celebrated by Eudist communities on October 20th, 1672; the first of St. Margaret Mary's revelations at Paray did not occur until December 27th, 1673, and the mass said in the Dijon Visitandines' chapel at their first public celebration of the Sacred Heart is clearly based on Eudes's mass. In the Beatification decree Pius X declared that John Eudes must be regarded as the father, doctor and apostle of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of its precursor, the devotion to the heart of Mary (Eudists celebrated a feast of the Holy Heart of Mary as early as 1648). The devotions founded by St. John Eudes and St. Margaret Mary have since merged into one, but it is possible to discern at the beginning differences of emphasis; for example, by `the love of Jesus' Eudes understands above all the love of Jesus for his Father, while the Paray devotion was concerned primarily with the love of Jesus for men.
Bérulle tried to give theocentric mysticism a specifically Catholic color by making it Christocentric; his disciple Eudes moves one step further on, from contemplation of the person of Jesus as a whole to contemplation of the ultimate source of love in that person: the heart. All Eudes' ideas are already present in his Royaume de Jésus (1637). His vernacular style (he wrote several devotional works) tends to be rhetorical and diffuse; his best writing is to be found in the Latin of his office of the Sacred Heart. He died on August 19th, 1680, was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1925.
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