Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort

Born at Montfort-sur-Meu in Brittany on 31 January 1673, Louis-Marie Grignion studied in Paris and was ordained a priest in 1700. Refusing a settled parish career, he chose itinerant preaching across western France, addressing the rural poor; his forceful methods earned him the hostility of several bishops, who barred him from their dioceses. In 1706 he travelled to Rome, where Clement XI confirmed his vocation by naming him a missionary apostolic. With Marie-Louise Trichet he founded the Daughters of Wisdom, devoted to the sick and the poor, and later the Company of Mary, known as the Montfortians. His writings — above all the Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, which lay buried until its discovery in 1842, and The Secret of Mary — shaped Marian spirituality lastingly: John Paul II drew his motto Totus tuus from them. Worn out by sixteen years of missions, he died at Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre on 28 April 1716, aged forty-three. He was canonised by Pius XII in 1947.