[00:00] Today, in celebrating the feast or the memorial of St. John Eudes, we are celebrating a few different things. St. John Eudes was truly, as the reading from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel speaks about, a shepherd after our Lord's heart. In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel,

[00:33] our Lord is admonishing the shepherds, calling them basically mercenaries, those who do the work for pay, but as soon as the wolves come, they run away. They exploit the sheep, basically everything that would make someone a bad shepherd, and metaphorically, and also analogously, a bad shepherd of souls as well, if you're speaking of those who are supposed to be shepherding

[01:04] God's sheep and tending to their souls. St. John Eudes, at the time in which he was living back in the early 1600s, he was assigned a task, a mission by God through His Sacred Heart to exercise compassion to those whom he would encounter. Now, St. John Vianney, another French saint, St. John Eudes is from France, and there's a great devotion to the

[01:40] Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sacred Heart of Mary. We now more frequently hear the term Immaculate Heart of Mary, but St. John Eudes and those who came before him would preach about the Sacred Heart of Mary, and in fact, where I'm from in Ontario, Canada, which there is a French influence, a French-Canadian influence, there's a parish called the Sacred Heart of Mary, and the other parish close by is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and they would have,

[02:15] those who came to Canada at the time, coming back in the 1600s, would have brought that devotion. So St. John Eudes, he was a very devout child. He entered the seminary, became a priest at 24 years old, and then at one point, just to show how our Lord used his love for souls,

[02:45] and especially like St. John Vianney said that the priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus, and St. John Eudes embodied that, and when there were plagues striking the people of France in that area, St. John Eudes went and administered to those who were sick, but because he had a fear that he would infect his brothers in religion and those around him, he decided to administer

[03:25] to the sick, and then he lived for a few years in a wine cask in a field, just so he wouldn't infect the people around him. So he literally was living, I don't know how big the wine cask is, but they say that he lived in this wine cask for a few years, and then he ended up joining the order of St. Philip Neri, the Oratorians, and he ended up becoming a great parish mission

[03:58] preacher, preaching over a hundred different missions, and then eventually, through his contact with some spiritual persons and people who were counseling him, he decided to administer to those who he saw were in the most need. One, he noticed that the priests in the area, and priests in France in general, were not getting the proper education, and they weren't able to give what they didn't have, so he decided to found some seminaries, with the permission of his superiors, to give more

[04:36] in-depth instruction to priests, and then from there, so he founded a few seminaries, and then from there, he also saw a need when he was going around preaching over a hundred different missions, sometimes you'd stay in one place for like months, like sometimes weekends, sometimes weeks, depending on what was needed, but then he started noticing this other plague, this epidemic of prostitution, and he saw that there were many young women who were wanting to leave that lifestyle, but they had

[05:12] nowhere to go, and speaking with different people, he realized that there was a need for refuge for them, so he founded the Sisters of Charity of Refuge for these young women, so they would have a place to go as a transition, and to be taken care of because of the lack of resources, so you can see that St. John Eudes really practiced what he preached, and what he preached was devotion to

[05:44] the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the source of our charity, of our love, of our grace, which gives us that virtue of charity, and then also the Sacred Heart, or the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is our example of virtue, that we are to imitate and practice, and also the love that Mary has coming from her Immaculate Heart for her children, so St. John Eudes eventually, because

[06:19] a new general superior disagreed with, you know, his missions and everything, so with consultation, he decided that there was such a great need in this area that he was working in that he would found his own congregation, so he ended up founding the Eudists, his own congregation, to continue the work which he started, and to promote devotion to the Sacred

[06:51] Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and then eventually that devotion caught on, especially under the patronage of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and Blessed Claude de la Colombière, and there was a connection between all these saints, and the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary caught on, especially through the apparitions and visions of St. Catherine Labouré in France, who promoted the Immaculate, and consequently the Immaculate Heart of Mary,

[07:30] which we see on the back of the Miraculous Medal, so we see how God uses all these saints to promote His devotion in order that people would grow in a certain virtue, and the virtue that our Lord wanted all of us, and especially those at that time, was in His love for neighbor, and also love of God our Father, so the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary,

[08:02] both of these devotions teach us where we are to place our energy, and that is in growing in the virtue of charity, first in toward God, the willingness to sacrifice our own lives, to be generous, and to not count the cost of carrying the cross and being Catholic Christians, and then also to be a source of that love to others, to love our neighbor as our Lord has loved us,

[08:41] to love our enemies even, and to pray for those who persecute us. The hearts of Jesus and Mary, according to St. John Eudes, are the highest expression of the mercy of God, they are the means which our Lord wants us to use in order to grow in charity, in love of Him, and love of our neighbor. In this way, all of us can be true shepherds to those who God has given to us under our care, whether we're priests, or whether we're just, you know, lay people. St.

[09:17] John Eudes did not discriminate, he wanted everyone to become missionaries, to become shepherds of souls, to understand that we are our brother's keeper, and if we truly love God, then we will love our neighbor, and we will exercise that virtue towards where it is needed the most, and to be examples of God's love in the world.