Feast of St Peter Chanel.
He was born on the 12th July 1803, in Cuet, a small village in south eastern France. As a youngster he looked after the cows on his family’s farm. He entered the Minor Seminary in Meximieux in 1819 and then onto the Major Seminary in Brou and from there was ordained a priest on the 15th of July 1827. He celebrated his first Mass in his home parish of Cuet on the 17th of July 1827.
He spent around five or six years as a Diocesan priest in a parish in Belley before entering the Society of Mary (Marists). After teaching in the seminary he was sent to Western Oceania in 1836 to an island called Futuna which formed part of a collection of Islands called the “friendly islands”.
Life was difficult and lonely for him and he struggled to convert many of the inhabitants. However, when he converted the son of the chief of the island, the chief in retaliation had him clubbed to death and his body cut into pieces.
Within two years of his death, the whole island was converted to Catholicism. As the old adage goes “ The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians”
St Peter Chanel reminds us of the virtues of courage, patience and perseverance and that God does things in his own time and not ours and in his own inimitable way. We are not called as laity and priests to be successful but faithful.
St Peter Chanel, Priest and Martyr. Pray for us
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