At Marseille in France, the passing of Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, who, a man renowned for learning and piety, by his eminent teaching defended and spread the truths of the faith; in the society named after Saint Vincent de Paul he showed unceasing charity to the poor, and, an outstanding father of a family, made his household a domestic church.
Lifespan: 1813–1853
Beatified: 22 August 1997 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 8 September
“Let us complain less about our times and more about ourselves”
Antoine Frédéric Ozanam was born in Milan on 23 April 1813, into a French family residing there during the Napoleonic Empire, which returned to Lyon — where it had its origins — in 1815. He completed his ordinary studies at the Royal College of Lyon, not without some moments of spiritual crisis. In 1831 he moved to Paris, where at the University of the Sorbonne he attended courses first in law and then in letters.
He quickly became part of the Catholic and literary circles of the capital, meeting important figures of the age, among them Chateaubriand, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, Lamennais, and others.
On 23 April 1833 he was among the small group of Sorbonne students who gathered to establish the first “Conference of Charity.” Their purpose was to bind their friendship under the sign of faith and charity, and to bear personal and authentic witness to their Christianity through home visits to the poor — in response to those who maintained that the Catholic Church was by then obsolete and had nothing more to say to modern men. This initiative gave birth to the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, which grew with remarkable rapidity. Ozanam was to become its principal animating spirit and to guide its early development.
In the meantime he wrote for various newspapers and journals on religious and social subjects, and worked to ensure the success of the great Lenten preaching series at Notre-Dame by Abbé Lacordaire, which was received with extraordinary enthusiasm.
On completing his studies he returned to Lyon to practise law and, for a brief period, to teach Commercial Law at that university.
In 1840 he was appointed Professor of Foreign Literatures at the Sorbonne in Paris, and the following year he married Amélie Soulacroix, who bore him a daughter, Marie.
His engagement in social and political life never slackened, and in 1848 he joined Lacordaire and Henri Maret in founding the celebrated newspaper L’Ère Nouvelle, which, though short-lived, was the most significant expression of what came to be called “French democratic Catholicism.”
With a precise intuition that the social problems of the age would soon overshadow its political ones, Ozanam expressed his thought with great clarity in defence of workers and the urban proletariat, criticising both the solution of economic liberalism founded on unlimited competition and the Saint-Simonian and socialist solution, which promised the elimination of suffering at the risk of eliminating freedom. He argued instead for a type of society grounded in private property as a response to an essential human need; for an organisation of labour that would guarantee a sufficient wage for workers and their families; for adequate public education and assistance; for forms of patronage among workers; for the observance of Sunday rest; and so forth.
These are among the ideas that mark him as one of the initiators of the Church’s social thought and, in particular, as a forerunner of the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which Pope Leo XIII would publish in 1891.
In that same year of 1848, following the abdication of King Louis-Philippe of Orléans and amid the upheavals in Paris that saw the killing of the Archbishop of the city, Monsignor Affre, who had sought to interpose himself between the barricades, Ozanam served in the National Guard, charged with guaranteeing the legality of the provisional government. That same year he accepted, in Lyon, a candidacy for the National Constituent Assembly, standing as a democrat and a republican. He was not elected.
He continued nonetheless to take part in the activities of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, frequently visiting its Conferences both in France and abroad — which he considered a fundamental preparation for young people in their social lives. “To draw close to misery, to touch it with one’s own hands, to discern its causes while knowing its effects at first hand, in affectionate familiarity with those who are oppressed by it” — such, in Ozanam’s view, was the proper initiation into social problems.
He came to know Italy well and was always greatly attached to it, making various journeys there at different times, both for scholarly purposes and for personal and religious reasons.
This life of such vigorous Christian engagement was accompanied by a rich interior and family life of great sensitivity and tenderness, not without moments of deep sorrow, and by friendships with many in his circle and his work that knew no wavering or interruption, but were a true sharing of faith and works.
His life was brief: he died at only forty years of age, in Marseille on 8 September 1853, on his return from Italy, where he had vainly sought relief from his ailments. His health in the final years of his life was indeed very fragile, yet he gave himself without reserve, above all in his university teaching. His acceptance of illness sublimated his life as a conscious offering to God of the renunciation of all he might still have accomplished, and in a meaningful synthesis deepened his devotion to the Society of Saint Vincent, which never diminished — indeed in some ways grew with the years, particularly in Italy during his final sojourn.