Bl. Frédéric Ozanam

Frédéric Ozanam was born in Milan in 1813 and grew up in Lyons, France, where his father was a doctor. As a teenager he went through a long crisis of doubt. A priest who taught him philosophy, the Abbé Noirot, helped him through it, and Ozanam promised to spend his life serving the truth.

He studied law in Paris. As a student, he and a few friends started visiting poor families in the city. The group became the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which today has hundreds of thousands of members worldwide.

Ozanam went on to teach foreign literature at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, and wrote on Dante and on Christian culture in the early Middle Ages. He died of illness in Marseilles in 1853, aged forty. John Paul II beatified him in Paris in 1997.

Ozanam described the doubts of his youth as torment. He did not hide them later; he credited a patient teacher, not his own strength, for bringing him back to faith.

Frédéric Ozanam was beatified in 1997.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.