Frédéric Ozanam

Antoine Frédéric Ozanam was born in Milan on 23 April 1813, into a French family living in Italy during the Napoleonic empire; in 1815 the Ozanams returned to Lyon, their native city. He was the fifth of fourteen children, of whom only three reached adulthood. His father Jean had served in the armies of the First Republic and afterwards turned to trade, teaching and finally medicine; his mother Marie shaped the household in piety. Frédéric made his ordinary studies at the Royal College of Lyon, not without a season of spiritual crisis, when doubt about the faith seized him; he was rescued and steadied by one of his teachers, the priest Joseph-Mathias Noirot, and from that hour he resolved to spend his intelligence in the service of the truth he had nearly lost.

His religious instincts appeared early. Still a youth, in 1831 he published Réflexions sur la doctrine de Saint-Simon, a pamphlet against Saint-Simonianism which drew the notice of Lamartine, and he helped to organize and write for the Association for the Propagation of the Faith. In the autumn of 1831 he went to Paris to follow the courses of the Sorbonne, first in law and then in letters. He suffered much from homesickness, but he entered at once the Catholic and literary circles of the capital, lodged for a time with the mathematician André-Marie Ampère, and came to know Chateaubriand, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, Lamennais and other leading men of the age.

With his companions Ozanam revived a student discussion group and turned it into a "Conference of History," where the social teaching of the Gospel was constantly debated. In one heated session, as the young Catholics were arguing from history that the Church was the work of Christ, an adversary threw down the challenge: whatever the Church may once have been, what is she doing now for the poor of Paris? Show us your works, and we will believe you. Ozanam took the reproach to heart. On 23 April 1833 — his twentieth birthday — he was among the small group of Sorbonne students who met to begin the first "Conference of Charity," binding their friendship under the sign of faith and charity and pledging to bear personal, authentic witness to Christ by visiting the poor in their own homes. This was the seed of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, which spread with extraordinary speed and which Ozanam would animate and guide through its first growth; by his death it counted upwards of two thousand members. The young men learned their method from Sister Rosalie Rendu, a Daughter of Charity famous for her service in the Paris slums, and with her they cared for the victims of cholera when fear had emptied the streets. Frédéric's own first act of charity was to carry his winter supply of firewood to a widow whose husband had died of the epidemic.

He wrote meanwhile in journals and reviews on religious and social questions, and in 1835 he prevailed upon Archbishop de Quélen to invite Henri Lacordaire to preach the Lenten conferences at Notre-Dame for the young men of Paris — a preaching of immense success, which became one of the great events of nineteenth-century Church life. Ozanam took his bachelor's degree in law in 1834, in letters in 1835, and his doctorate in law in 1836. His father died on 12 May 1837; though his heart was in literature, Frédéric practised as an advocate at Lyon to support his mother, and for a short time held the chair of commercial law in that university. In 1839 he received the doctorate in letters with a thesis on Dante which became the foundation of his best-known books.

In 1840 he was appointed assistant professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, and in 1844, on the death of Fauriel, full professor. His lectures were crowded, though he dared to place Christianity at the centre of the growth of European civilization in a faculty largely hostile to the faith; he set out to prove against Gibbon that the Church had civilized the invading barbarians and formed the life of the Middle Ages. In June 1841 he married Amélie Soulacroix, daughter of the rector of the University of Lyon, and their daughter Marie was born to them. His public labours were matched by a hidden family life of great delicacy and tenderness, not without deep sorrows, and by friendships that never faltered but were a true sharing of faith and works.

Ozanam saw with clear intuition that the political questions of his day would soon be overtaken by social ones. In 1848, after the abdication of Louis-Philippe, he served in the National Guard which was to secure the legality of the provisional government — those were the days when the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Affre, was killed while trying to interpose himself between the barricades. That same year, with Lacordaire and Henri Maret, he founded the newspaper L'Ère nouvelle, short-lived but the most significant expression of French democratic Catholicism, and he stood as a candidate at Lyon for the National Constituent Assembly, professing himself democrat and republican; he was not elected. In his writing he defended the workers and the urban poor, rejecting alike the economic liberalism of unlimited competition and the Saint-Simonian and socialist promise to abolish suffering at the price of abolishing liberty. He argued for private property as answering a real human need, for an organization of labour guaranteeing a wage sufficient for the worker and his family, for schooling and public assistance, for associations among workers, and for the observance of Sunday rest. For these ideas he is honoured as one of the initiators of the Church's social thought and a forerunner of Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891.

He never withdrew from the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, visiting its conferences in France and abroad and holding this work to be, for young men, the essential preparation for their whole social life: to draw near to misery, to touch it with one's hands, to discern its causes by knowing its effects at first hand, in affectionate familiarity with those whom it oppresses — such, he said, must be the initiation into social questions. He loved Italy dearly and travelled there often, for study, for family and for devotion, and he visited England for the Exhibition of 1851.

His constitution was never strong, and consumption wore him down while he spent himself to the last, above all in his university teaching. He went to Italy in search of relief and found none. The acceptance of his illness raised his life to an offering: a conscious surrender to God of all that he might still have done, while his concern for the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, far from cooling, grew in those final years, especially during his last stay in Italy. Returning to France, he died at Marseille on 8 September 1853, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, aged only forty. He was buried in the crypt of the church of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes at the Institut Catholique in Paris.

Pope John Paul II beatified him in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on 22 August 1997, preaching on the Good Samaritan and reminding the young of the world that the neighbour is every human being without exception. Frédéric Ozanam remains the model of the lay Christian who does not wait for someone else to act: a student who answered mockery with mercy, a scholar who put his learning at the service of the Gospel, a husband and father whose sanctity was woven into ordinary duties, a friend of the poor who insisted on going to them in person.

May his prayers obtain for us the courage to stop lamenting our times and instead to carry, today and with our own hands, something warm and concrete to one poor neighbour.

BEATIFICATION OF FREDERIC OZANAM

HOMILY OF JOHN PAUL II

Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris - Friday, August 22, 1997

1. "Love is from God" (1 Jn 4, 7).

Today's Gospel presents to us the figure of the good Samaritan. With this parable, Christ wishes to show his listeners who is the neighbor mentioned in the greatest commandment of divine Law: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself" (Lk 10, 29). A doctor of the Law asked what he should do to have eternal life: he found in these words the decisive answer. He knew that the love of God and of neighbor is the first and greatest of the commandments. Despite this, he asks: "And who is my neighbor?" (Lk 10, 29).

The fact that Jesus proposes a Samaritan as an example to answer such a question is significant. Indeed, the Samaritans were not particularly esteemed by the Jews. Moreover: Christ compares the behavior of this man to that of a priest and a Levite who had seen the man wounded by robbers and lying on the road almost dead, and had continued on their way without rendering him aid. On the contrary, the Samaritan who saw the suffering man, "was moved with compassion" (Lk 10, 33). His compassion led him to a series of actions. First he bandaged his wounds, then he brought the wounded man to an inn so that he would be cared for; and before leaving, he gave the innkeeper the money necessary so that he would look after him (cf. Lk 10, 34-35). The example is eloquent. The doctor of the Law receives a clear answer to his question: who is my neighbor? The neighbor is every human being, without exception. It is useless to ask his nationality, his social or religious affiliation. If he is in need, it is necessary to come to his aid. This is what the first and greatest divine Law demands, the law of love of God and of neighbor.

Faithful to this commandment of the Lord, Frederic Ozanam believed in love, the love that God has for every man. He felt himself called to love, giving the example of a great love of God and of others. He went toward all those who had the greatest need to be loved, those to whom God Love could not be concretely revealed except through the love of another person. Ozanam discovered in this his vocation, he saw in it the path upon which Christ was calling him. He found his way to holiness. And he pursued it with determination.

2. "Love is from God". The love of man has its source in the Law of God. The first reading taken from the Old Testament shows this. We find in it a detailed description of the acts of love of neighbor. It is almost a biblical preparation for the parable of the good Samaritan.

The second reading, taken from the First Letter of Saint John, develops the meaning of the words "love is from God". The Apostle writes to his disciples: "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love" (1 Jn 4, 7-8). This word of the Apostle is truly at the center of the New Covenant, the summit toward which everything that has been written in the Gospels and in the apostolic Letters leads us. Saint John continues: "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins" (Ibid., 4, 10). The remission of sins manifests the love that the Son of God made man has toward us. Then, the love of neighbor, the love of man is no longer merely a commandment. It is a demand that flows from the lived experience of God's love. That is why John can write: "Since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another" (1 Jn 4, 11).

The teaching of John's Letter continues; the Apostle writes: "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God remains in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we remain in him and he in us; he has given us his Spirit" (1 Jn 4, 12-13). Love is therefore the source of knowledge. If, on one hand, knowledge is a condition of love, on the other hand, love causes knowledge to grow. If we remain in love, we experience intimately the action of the Holy Spirit that makes us participate in the redemptive love of the Son whom the Father has sent for the salvation of the world. Recognizing Christ as the Son of God, we remain in him and, through him, we remain in God. By the merits of Christ, we have believed in love, we know the love that God has for us, we know that God is love (cf. 1 Jn 4,16). Such knowledge through love is in a certain sense the keystone of the entire spiritual life of the Christian. "Whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him" (Ibid.).

3. In the context of the World Youth Day, which takes place this year in Paris, I proceed today to the beatification of Frédéric Ozanam. I cordially greet His Eminence Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, the city where the tomb of the new Blessed is located. I am pleased also by the presence at this event of Bishops from numerous countries. I greet with affection the members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul who have come from all over the world for the beatification of their principal founder, as well as the representatives of the great spiritual family heir to the spirit of Saint Vincent. The bonds among Vincentians were privileged from the origins of the Society, since it was a Daughter of Charity, Sister Rosalia Rendu, who guided the young Frédéric Ozanam and his companions toward the poor of the Mouffetard neighborhood of Paris. Dear disciples of Saint Vincent de Paul, I encourage you to pool your strengths, so that, as your inspirer wished, the poor may always be better loved and served, and Jesus Christ be honored in their persons!

4. Frédéric Ozanam loved all those in need. From his youth, he became aware that it was not enough to speak of charity and the mission of the Church in the world: this had to be translated into an effective commitment of Christians in the service of the poor. He was thus in harmony with the intuition of Saint Vincent: "Let us love God, brethren, let us love God, but let it be with our arms, and with the sweat of our brow" (Saint Vincent de Paul, XI, 40). To demonstrate this concretely, at the age of twenty-five, with a group of friends, he created the Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul, the purpose of which was assistance to the poorest, in a spirit of service and sharing. Soon these Conferences spread beyond France, to all the countries of Europe and the world. I myself, as a student, before the Second World War, was part of one of them.

Now the love toward the most miserable, those whom no one cares for, is at the center of the life and concerns of Frédéric Ozanam. Speaking of these men and women, he wrote: "We ought to fall at their feet and say to them with the Apostle: 'Tu es Dominus meus'. You are our masters and we will be your servants; you are for us the sacred images of God whom we do not see and, not knowing how to love him otherwise, we love him in your persons" (Frédéric Ozanam, A Louis Janmot).

5. He observes the real situation of the poor and seeks an increasingly effective commitment to help them grow in humanity. He understands that charity must lead to working to correct injustices. Charity and justice go hand in hand. He has the lucid courage of a commitment of foremost social and political importance in a turbulent era of his Country's life, since no society can accept misery as a fatality without its honor being affected. Thus one can see in him a precursor of the social doctrine of the Church, which Pope Leo XIII would develop some years later in the encyclical Rerum novarum.

In the face of the poverty that oppresses many men and women, charity is a prophetic sign of the Christian's commitment to following Christ. I therefore invite the laity and particularly young people to show courage and imagination in working toward the building of more fraternal societies where the most needy will be recognized in their dignity and will find the means for a dignified existence. With the humility and limitless trust in Divine Providence that characterized Frederick Ozanam, have the boldness to share material and spiritual goods with those who are in misery!

6. Blessed Frederick Ozanam, apostle of charity, exemplary spouse and father of a family, great figure of nineteenth-century Catholic laity, was an academic who played an important role in the intellectual movement of his time. A student, an eminent professor first in Lyon and then at the Sorbonne in Paris, he aimed above all at the search for and communication of truth, in serenity and respect for the convictions of those who do not share his views. "Let us learn to defend our convictions without hating our adversaries, he wrote, to love those who think differently from us, [...] let us complain less about our times and more about ourselves" (Letters, April 9, 1851). With the courage of a believer, denouncing all selfishness, he actively participated in the renewal of the Church's presence and action in the society of his epoch. His role in the establishment of the Lenten Conferences in this Notre-Dame cathedral of Paris is also well known, with the aim of allowing young people to receive renewed religious instruction in the face of the great questions that challenge faith. A man of thought and action, Frederick Ozanam is for the university people of our time, professors and students, a model of courageous commitment capable of making a free and demanding word heard in the search for truth and in the defense of the dignity of every human person. May he also be for them a call to holiness!

7. The Church today confirms the choice of Christian life made by Ozanam, as well as the path he has taken. It says to him: Frederick, your way has truly been the way of holiness. More than a century has passed, and behold the opportune moment to rediscover this path. All these young people, more or less of your age, gathered together in such great numbers in Paris, coming from all the countries of Europe and the world, must recognize that this is also their way. They must understand that, if they wish to be authentic Christians, they must undertake the same path. Let them open the eyes of their soul more fully to the so numerous needs of men today. Let them understand these needs as challenges. Christ calls each one by name, so that each one can say: behold my way! In the choices they will make, your holiness, Frederick, will be confirmed in a particular way. And your joy will be great. You who already see with your own eyes Him who is love, be also a guide on every path that these young people will choose, following your example today!