St. Peter Julian Eymard

Born of working parents in the southern French village of La Mure d'Isere in 1811, Peter Julian Eymard was a child of a Church and a society deeply marked by the effects of the French Revolution. Speaking of his pathway to his vocation as Founder of a new religious Society, Fr Eymard claimed that he had been a little like Jacob, "always searching for the Lord's will for him".
This evolution led him through the novitiate of the Oblate Missionaries of Mary, the parish clergy and the Society of Mary. After years of prayerful searching he finally founded in Paris, in 1856, in company with one companion the Count Raymond de Cuers, the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, (later to include women known as the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament).Fr Eymard, while still a Marist in 1851, claimed that he could see only one solution to the almost universal religious indifference of so many Catholics of his time and that this was the Holy Eucharist.How his Congregations were to "live the Eucharist" would, like his life in general, evolve.

At first he proposed a life of perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in a spirit of Reparation. As the needs of society and the Church's understanding of the Eucharistic Mystery evolved, so did Fr Eymard's Congregation's understanding of itself. While still finding a special place in its life for the prayer of eucharistic adoration, its overall aim, as expressed in the new Rule formally approved by the Church in 1984, is its understanding of the development of Fr Eymard's thought as follows :

"Our ideal is to live the mystery of the Eucharist fully and to make known its meaning so that Christ's reign may come to be, and God's glory be shown to the world."

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