Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort, Priest

Louis-Marie Grignion was born in 1673 at Montfort in Brittany and ordained a priest in Paris in 1700. He served in the hospital at Poitiers and then spent his life preaching missions in the towns and villages of western France, often on foot, writing hymns for the people to sing. Many bishops distrusted his ways, and in 1706 he walked to Rome, where Clement XI named him a missionary apostolic.

At Pontchâteau his parishioners built a great calvary, which the authorities ordered torn down in 1710. His book True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, found only in 1842, became widely read. With Marie-Louise Trichet he founded the Daughters of Wisdom, and he began the Company of Mary. He died at Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre on 28 April 1716 and was canonized in 1947.