Blessed Daniel Brottier

Blessed Daniel Brottier was a French priest of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, a missionary in Senegal, a chaplain to soldiers at the front in the First World War, and a guardian of orphans in Paris. The Church commemorates him on February 28.

He was born on September 7, 1876, in La Ferté-Saint-Cyr, in the Diocese of Blois in central France. He was ordained a priest on October 22, 1899, and taught at the college in Pontlevoy, yet he longed for religious life and missionary work. In 1902 he began his novitiate with the Spiritans at Orly near Paris, and a year later he made his religious vows.

Soon afterward he left for Saint-Louis in Senegal, then a French colony. In the parish there he was entrusted with the young people: he ran youth clubs for them and founded a choir and a brass band. He suffered, however, from severe headaches. In 1906 he left for treatment, and in 1911 he had to return to France for good. At that time he considered the contemplative life, but a trial stay at the abbey on the Lérins Islands convinced him that this was not his path.

He went on serving Africa from Paris. Bishop Jalabert, his former superior at Saint-Louis, entrusted him with the work called “Souvenir Africain,” a fundraising campaign to build the cathedral of Dakar, conceived as a memorial to those who had given their lives in Africa. Father Brottier worked for it until it was completed.

When war broke out in 1914, he volunteered as a chaplain. He spent four years with the soldiers on the front line, at Verdun and on the Somme among other places: he carried the wounded from the battlefield, comforted them, and stayed with the dying. He himself was never wounded. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. Bishop Jalabert later confided to him that throughout the war he had commended him to the protection of Thérèse of Lisieux, and from then on Father Brottier had a special devotion to her. After the war the National Union of Combatants was founded on his initiative, to keep alive the brotherhood born in the trenches.

In 1923, at the request of the archbishop of Paris, the Spiritans took over the Orphan Apprentices of Auteuil (Orphelins Apprentis d’Auteuil), founded in 1866 by Father Louis Roussel. Father Brottier was put in charge of it. The debt-ridden institution was then caring for about 170 boys, whom it trained for a trade. The new director entrusted them to Thérèse of the Child Jesus and built a chapel in her honor at Auteuil, consecrated in 1930. He tirelessly sought benefactors and opened further houses outside Paris. By the time of his death the work was caring for about 1,400 young people.

In February 1936 the cathedral of Dakar was consecrated, but Father Brottier, in poor health, could not travel there. He died in Paris on February 28, 1936, and was laid to rest in the chapel of Saint Thérèse at Auteuil. John Paul II beatified him on November 25, 1984, in Saint Peter’s Basilica. The Pope said on that occasion that Father Brottier worked as if everything depended on him, while knowing that everything depends on God.