St. Peter Julian Eymard

Peter Julian Eymard is the founder of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament — the Sacramentines — and the figure through whom the spirituality of perpetual eucharistic adoration was given institutional form in the nineteenth-century Church. He was born in La Mure in Dauphiné in 1811, the son of a cutler, ordained as a diocesan priest in 1834, entered the Marists in 1839, and spent the next fifteen years living the tension between the active apostolate of the Marists and an interior call toward a form of life centred entirely on the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. In 1856 he left the Marists to found the new congregation.

The Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, which he formally established in Paris in 1856, was dedicated to the practice of perpetual adoration — the maintenance of an unbroken presence of religious in prayer before the exposed Blessed Sacrament — and to the apostolate of preparing laypeople for frequent communion at a time when communion was received by most Catholics only rarely. The context is important: the controversy over frequent communion was still alive in the nineteenth century, and Eymard's apostolate of preparing the laity for regular reception was a practical theological statement about the nature of the Eucharist and about who could approach it.

He founded a women's branch, the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament, in 1858. He died at La Mure in 1868, having established communities in France, Belgium, and Italy. The correspondence and conferences he left behind constitute one of the most sustained bodies of eucharistic theology produced in the French Catholic revival. He was canonized by Paul VI in June 1962, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council — the last canonization of the pre-conciliar period.