August 2nd – Saint of the Day: Saint Peter Julian Eymard, Priest & Founder of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament in Paris & the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament

The Man Who Gave Everything to the Eucharist

On August 2nd, the Church honors Saint Peter Julian Eymard, a nineteenth century French priest whom the faithful have long called the Apostle of the Eucharist. In an age when many Catholics approached Holy Communion rarely and timidly, he spent his entire priesthood insisting that the Eucharist is not a distant prize for the perfect but the living heart of the Christian life, the daily bread of sinners on the way home. He founded two religious congregations, the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament for men and the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament for women, both consecrated to adoration of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament and to leading forgotten souls back to the altar. He organized laypeople and diocesan priests into Eucharistic associations, prepared the poorest workers of Paris for their First Communion, and pressed tirelessly for the frequent reception of Communion decades before Pope Pius X made that the common practice of the Church. His entire message can be gathered into one conviction that the Church herself now teaches with his same urgency: the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life (CCC 1324). Everything Peter Julian did, every congregation he founded, every mile he traveled on worn out health, flowed from his certainty that Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the Blessed Sacrament, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity (CCC 1374). His feast is kept on the universal Roman calendar as an optional memorial, placed on August 2nd because August 1st, the day he died, already belongs to Saint Alphonsus Liguori. When August 2nd falls on a Sunday, as it sometimes does, the Sunday celebration takes precedence and his memorial is not observed that year. His story is the story of a man who found one treasure buried in a field and sold everything he had, again and again, to keep it.

The Cutler’s Son Who Walked to Mary

Peter Julian Eymard was born on February 4, 1811 in La Mure d’Isère, a small town in the French Alps within the Diocese of Grenoble. France was still staggering out of the Revolution, and the Church there had been battered by decades of persecution, confiscation, and hostility toward priests. Into that wounded landscape, Peter Julian arrived as the last of ten children, eight of whom died in infancy. His family were humble, devout craftsmen; his father worked a metal trade, most often described as that of a cutler, and the boy labored alongside him at the workbench through his youth. Sorrow and fragility marked the household from the beginning, and Peter Julian himself struggled with poor health for his entire life.

Yet grace was at work early. Tradition within his congregation recounts that as a small boy he was once found standing close to the tabernacle, explaining that he was near Jesus and listening to Him. That story comes from the devotional memory of his spiritual family rather than from contemporary documentation, and it cannot be verified. What can be verified is remarkable enough. Before his First Communion on March 16, 1823, the twelve year old made a pilgrimage on foot to the Marian shrine of Notre-Dame du Laus. Of that encounter he later wrote, “For the first time I knew Mary and loved her.” On the day of his First Communion itself, he resolved to become a priest.

His father, having buried so many children, wanted his only surviving son at home and firmly opposed the vocation. When Peter Julian’s mother died in 1828, the young man pressed forward anyway, entering the novitiate of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in June 1829 despite his father’s objections. Serious illness broke that first attempt, and he returned home apparently defeated. Only after his father’s death did the path open again. He entered the seminary at Grenoble, and on July 20, 1834, at twenty three years old, Peter Julian Eymard was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Grenoble.

The France of his seminary years was still soaked in the lingering influence of Jansenism, a rigorist movement that so magnified human sinfulness and unworthiness that many of the faithful stayed away from Communion out of fear. Peter Julian absorbed some of that severe spirituality in his early formation, and he spent years wrestling his way out of it. That interior struggle became one of the hidden engines of his mission, because the man who had once been taught to keep his distance from the altar would spend the rest of his life begging the world to draw near. After several years as a parish priest, he sought a deeper consecration, and on August 20, 1839 he professed vows in the Society of Mary, the Marists, drawn by his lifelong tenderness toward the Mother of God.

The Procession That Changed a Life

Within the Marists, Father Eymard’s gifts became impossible to hide. He served as spiritual director at the Marist college in Belley and rose to become provincial in Lyon in 1845. He was an outstanding preacher, a gifted organizer of lay associations, and a man whose energy constantly outran his frail body. It was precisely his apostolic work that carried him into the great currents of Eucharistic piety then stirring in France, especially through preaching the Forty Hours devotion in parish after parish.

Then came the day that defined everything. On the Feast of Corpus Christi, May 25, 1845, Father Eymard carried the Blessed Sacrament in procession at the church of Saint Paul in Lyon. As he held his Lord in his hands, he was seized by an intense attraction to Christ in the Eucharist, and he made a resolution that his congregation has preserved in his own words: to “bring all the world to the knowledge and love of our Lord; to preach nothing but Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ Eucharistic.” He asked in that moment for the apostolic zeal of Saint Paul. The grace of that procession never released him.

The years that followed deepened the call. In 1849, during a visit to Paris, he encountered the Association of Nocturnal Adorers, laymen who kept watch before the exposed Blessed Sacrament through the night, and the experience marked him permanently. After praying at the shrine of Our Lady of Fourvière on January 21, 1851, he began to move toward founding a community wholly dedicated to Eucharistic adoration. His Marist superiors judged that this was not the charism of the Society of Mary, and his zeal cost him. He was removed from his position and sent to the Marist college at La Seyne-sur-Mer, where he served from 1851 to 1855. What could have felt like exile became a school of discernment, and the conviction only grew.

In 1856 he made the most painful decision of his life and asked to leave the Marists he loved. Arriving in Paris on April 30, 1856, he brought his project to Archbishop Sibour, who at first refused, believing the proposed work was purely contemplative. Father Eymard’s answer has come down to us: “We want to adore, but we also want others to adore.” He explained his plan to prepare the neglected adults of Paris for their First Communion, and the Archbishop was won over. On May 13, 1856, the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament was born.

The new community joined contemplation and mission in a single life. Its priests and brothers adored Jesus exposed in the monstrance, and then went out to the ragpickers, the young laborers, and the religiously abandoned poor of Paris, catechizing men and women who had never been taught the faith and leading them to the altar for the first time. Here the Church’s own teaching shines through his method, for the Catechism affirms that the Eucharist commits believers to the poor, and that receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in truth requires recognizing Christ in the poorest of His brethren (CCC 1397). In 1858, together with Marguerite Guillot, he founded the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament, a contemplative congregation of women devoted to perpetual adoration. He established the Priests’ Eucharistic League to kindle Eucharistic love among diocesan clergy, and formed lay associations so that ordinary Catholics could share the mission. Canonical approval from Rome arrived on the eve of Corpus Christi, June 3, 1863, and in 1865 he was elected superior general.

One episode from those Paris years deserves special telling. In 1863 a grieving young sculptor, devastated by the death of his sister and ready to abandon his art, entered the community for several months. His name was Auguste Rodin. During his stay he modeled a bust of Father Eymard which survives to this day. The tradition attached to this documented encounter holds that Father Eymard discerned that the young man’s true vocation lay in his art and encouraged him to return to it and persevere. The bust and Rodin’s stay are historical fact; the content of Father Eymard’s counsel is a story handed down rather than a documented exchange, and it cannot be verified. Rodin left, returned to sculpture, and became one of the most celebrated artists of the modern age.

Father Eymard was not a wonder worker in the manner of saints famed for dramatic miracles during life, and honesty requires saying that plainly. No healings or prodigies during his lifetime are documented in the sources of his congregation. His miracle was of another kind: a dying devotion rekindled across a nation, thousands of poor souls brought to Communion, and a spirituality of adoration that would help renew the whole Church. He was a tireless advocate of frequent Holy Communion at a time when this was rare and even suspect, and the Church later vindicated him completely when Pope Pius X gave frequent Communion authoritative backing in 1905. The Catechism today echoes what Father Eymard preached to resistant ears: the Church warmly recommends that the faithful receive Holy Communion whenever they participate in the celebration of the Eucharist, provided they have the required dispositions (CCC 1388).

Worn Down by Every Kind of Difficulty

Saint Peter Julian Eymard was not a martyr, but his road was shadowed by the cross from beginning to end. His childhood was marked by poverty and by the graves of eight brothers and sisters. His vocation had to survive his father’s opposition and a first failed attempt broken by sickness. His seminary formation handed him a Jansenist severity that he had to unlearn slowly and painfully, fighting for years toward the discovery that God’s love, not human unworthiness, stands at the center of the Gospel. His congregation describes this as a lifelong interior struggle to offer the gift of his entire self.

The founding years brought their own trials. Leaving the Marists cost him dearly, and the early Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament nearly collapsed more than once. Recruits were few, money was scarce, first locations failed, and he had to move and begin again. Securing diocesan approval required overcoming the Archbishop’s initial refusal, and papal approbation demanded years of patient effort and journeys to Rome. Through all of it his health deteriorated. In his final years he suffered from rheumatic gout and relentless insomnia, and his congregation records that he united these sufferings to Jesus in the Eucharist, living the truth the Catechism teaches, that by His Passion Christ has given a new meaning to suffering, which can henceforth configure the sufferer to Him and unite that person with His redemptive Passion (CCC 1505).

In 1865, during a long retreat in Rome, he reached the summit of his interior life, making what he called the gift of his personality, a total surrender of self to Christ that his spiritual writings describe as the vow of nothingness before God. Three years later his body gave out. Exhausted and gravely ill, he set out for his home in the mountains in the summer of 1868. His biographers recount that, stopping in Grenoble, he went straight to the adoration chapel and asked to celebrate Mass. The resident priest hesitated, seeing that Father Eymard could barely stand, but yielded to his determination and assisted him through what became the final Mass of his life. A short time later, on August 1, 1868, Peter Julian Eymard died in his childhood home at La Mure at fifty seven years old. His biographers add the detail that he died holding a small statue of Our Lady of La Salette against his heart. These final scenes come from the devotional biographies of his congregation, and while entirely consistent with the man, the details of the last Mass and the statue rest on that testimony and cannot be independently verified.

That last detail, even as reported tradition, fits the whole shape of his life. Father Eymard had been among the very first to believe in the apparition of Our Lady at La Salette in 1846, which took place in his own diocese. He encouraged the pilgrimage, promoted the devotion, and climbed to the holy mountain himself at least a dozen times. The man who learned to love Mary as a boy walking to Notre-Dame du Laus never stopped going to Jesus through His Mother, and he gave the Church the beautiful title of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, honoring Mary as the first adorer of her Son.

The Incorrupt Witness and the Miracles That Made a Saint

Father Eymard was first buried in the public cemetery at La Mure. After the consecration of his congregation’s Corpus Christi Chapel in Paris in September 1876, his remains were transferred there in 1877. At the exhumation, witnesses testified that his body was found incorrupt, showing no odor or sign of decay apart from a darkening of the skin, nine years after burial. This account is preserved in the testimony gathered by his congregation and documented in Joan Carroll Cruz’s study of incorrupt saints. In a sadly human turn, an attempt to preserve the body further by applying carbolic acid backfired and hastened its natural deterioration, so that today his bones rest encased for veneration in the Corpus Christi Chapel in Paris. The Church has never defined incorruption as proof of sanctity, and this story is offered as the documented testimony of witnesses rather than as a formally judged miracle.

Reports of graces and miracles at his tomb began soon after his death, and his congregation preserves the memory that many favors were received there, though the individual tomb stories were not separately documented in the sources available and cannot be verified one by one. What the Church did verify, with her characteristic rigor, were the miracles for his beatification and canonization. Cures from 1916 and 1919 were investigated and accepted as miraculous healings obtained through his intercession, and on July 12, 1925, during that Jubilee Year, Pope Pius XI beatified him; Pope Pius X had already declared him Venerable on August 11, 1908. Two further miracles opened the way to canonization. On May 29, 1948, after a series of novenas seeking his intercession, Father Charles Verdier of Bourges in France was spontaneously and completely cured of chronic tuberculosis of the left foot. In 1949, an Australian woman named Dora Bartels was healed of mitral valve stenosis, a grave disease of the heart, after prayer for Blessed Peter Julian’s intercession. Both cures were examined and approved by the Sacred Congregation of Rites.

On December 9, 1962, one day after the close of the first session of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Saint John XXIII canonized Peter Julian Eymard in Saint Peter’s Basilica. The timing reads like providence. The Council would soon teach, in words the Catechism now enshrines, that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life (CCC 1324), and the Church raised to her altars the very priest who had spent himself proclaiming exactly that a century early. In 1995, Pope Saint John Paul II inscribed his memorial on the General Roman Calendar for the universal Church, and in 1969 Pope Saint Paul VI had already written to his congregation praising adoration of the Blessed Sacrament outside Mass, the devotion Father Eymard did so much to spread.

His legacy has places as well as dates. His relics are venerated in the Corpus Christi Chapel in Paris. His shrine church in Rome is Santi Claudio e Andrea dei Borgognoni, entrusted to his congregation. At the Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette, an oratory dedicated to him now houses the Blessed Sacrament for silent adoration, uniting his two great loves on the holy mountain he climbed so often. In New York City, the Church of Saint Jean Baptiste, served by his spiritual sons, contains a magnificent altar where his statue holds a monstrance, presenting Christ in the Eucharist to the world. His congregations serve today across the globe, and every parish holy hour, every perpetual adoration chapel glowing at three in the morning, stands in some measure in his debt.

His words still burn. In his book Le Très Saint Sacrement he wrote, “Solemn Exposition is necessary to awaken the dormant faith of so many honest people. Society dies when it no longer has a center of truth and charity, when it no longer has family life. When everyone is isolated, focused on themselves, wanting to be self-sufficient, disintegration is imminent. But society will be reborn with vigor when all of its members come together and are united around our Emmanuel.” And he diagnosed his century, and ours, in a single sentence: “I have always sought remedies for the universal indifference that afflicts so many people, and I have found only one: the Eucharist, love for Jesus in the Eucharist. Loss of faith comes from a loss of love.”

What the Apostle of the Eucharist Asks of You

Saint Peter Julian Eymard’s life poses one piercing question to every believer: if Jesus Christ is truly present in the tabernacle of the nearest Catholic church, what follows for the way a life should be arranged? The Catechism teaches that the Church has always offered to the Sacrament of the Eucharist the worship of adoration, not only during Mass but also outside of it, exposing the sacred species to the solemn veneration of the faithful (CCC 1378), and it commends visiting the Blessed Sacrament as a proof of gratitude, an expression of love, and a duty of adoration toward Christ the Lord (CCC 1418). Father Eymard simply took that teaching with complete seriousness, and then gave his whole existence to it.

When was the last time you sat in silence before the Blessed Sacrament and let Jesus look at you? His example suggests a practical beginning: one holy hour a week, or even fifteen quiet minutes stolen from a lunch break, before the tabernacle. Adoration is not a hobby for the especially pious; it is the natural response of anyone who believes what the Church teaches about the Real Presence. His life also rebukes the quiet Jansenism that still whispers in many hearts, the voice that says a person is too sinful, too distracted, or too far gone to approach Communion. The answer is not to stay away but to return honestly, through the Sacrament of Reconciliation when grave sin requires it (CCC 1385), and then to receive the Lord frequently and gratefully, since Holy Communion preserves, increases, and renews the life of grace received at Baptism (CCC 1392).

There is a second lesson, easily missed. Father Eymard refused to separate the monstrance from the poor. The same man who knelt for hours before the Host went out to catechize ragpickers, because he understood that the Eucharist commits believers to the poor (CCC 1397). Adoration that never becomes charity has not yet understood what it adores. Who in your life is waiting, perhaps without knowing it, for someone to bring them back to the altar? A coworker who drifted away years ago, a family member who was never taught the faith, a friend carrying old wounds from the Church: Father Eymard would say that these souls are the reason adorers exist.

Finally, his perseverance instructs anyone whose calling has met resistance. His vocation was opposed by his father, interrupted by illness, misunderstood by superiors, and nearly wrecked by poverty and failure, and he answered every setback by beginning again before the Blessed Sacrament. What setback in your own life might God be asking you to carry back to the tabernacle rather than carry alone? Holiness, as his story shows, is not the absence of obstacles but fidelity through them, for God calls all the faithful to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity (CCC 2013).

Engage With Us!

Saint Peter Julian Eymard gave everything to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and spent his life inviting others to do the same. Now the invitation passes to you. Share your thoughts, your experiences of Eucharistic adoration, and your reflections on his story in the comments below; your witness may be exactly what another reader needs to find the courage to return to the altar. Consider these questions as you reflect:

What does the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist mean to you personally, and how has that belief shaped, or how could it begin to shape, your daily routine?
Saint Peter Julian struggled for years against a spirituality of fear before discovering a spirituality of love. Where in your own faith life does fear still speak louder than love?
He prepared the poorest workers of Paris for their First Communion. Who is one person you could gently accompany closer to Christ this month, and what is one concrete step you could take?
His plans failed repeatedly before they bore fruit. How might his perseverance change the way you look at a current disappointment or delay in your own life?
If you committed to just fifteen minutes of Eucharistic adoration each week, what would you most want to bring before the Lord?

Take his story with you this week. Find the nearest adoration chapel, or simply a quiet pew before the tabernacle, and give Jesus the gift Saint Peter Julian treasured above all others: your presence before His. Live this day, and every day, with the love and mercy that Jesus taught us, and let the Bread of Life become, as it was for the Apostle of the Eucharist, the center from which everything else in life flows.

Saint Peter Julian Eymard, pray for us!

Holy Manna!