Basil Moreau - Ministry As A Young Priest

Ministry As A Young Priest

Restoration of the Church was the principal theme and work of Fr. Moreau's life. As most of the pastors and teachers in France before the Revolution were priests and religious who were forced into exile, by the 1820s most of the nation was ill-catechized, illiterate, and without the benefit of the sacraments. As a young priest and throughout his life, Basil was an effective preacher who preached parish missions and offered the sacraments on an itinerant basis to rekindle the neglected faith in towns and villages throughout the region.

In 1835, many things happened that would be central to Fr. Moreau’s work for the rest of his life. He was assigned to be the assistant superior of the seminary at Le Mans, where he was a popular and inspiring professor of theology. He founded a group of priests within the Diocese of Le Mans that would assist him in his various endeavors to re-invigorate the Church throughout the region, especially preaching parish missions. He called them the Society of Auxiliary Priests. In the same year, an older priest of the same diocese, Fr. Jacques-Francois Dujarié, who fifteen years before, in 1820, had founded a band of young men to re-establish and teach in the schools throughout the region, handed responsibility for them over to Fr. Moreau on account of his failing health. While not technically religious because they had not made a novitiate or taken public vows, many of these young men, known as the Brothers of St. Joseph, desired to become a recognized religious organization.