Saint André-Hubert Fournet

Saint André-Hubert Fournet was a French priest, pastor of Maillé in the diocese of Poitiers. During the French Revolution, although outlawed, he secretly strengthened the faithful in their faith, and when peace returned to the Church he founded, together with Saint Jeanne-Élisabeth Bichier des Ages, the Congregation of the Daughters of the Cross. The Church commemorates him on May 13.

He was born on December 6, 1752, in Maillé, into a devout and well-to-do family. He studied at the college in Châtellerault and then spent two years studying law in Poitiers. Conversations with his uncle, the pastor of Haims, led him to enter the seminary in Poitiers. He was ordained a priest at the end of 1776. For three years he served as his uncle’s curate, and then he became pastor of the parish of Saint Peter in his native Maillé.

A meeting with a beggar proved to be a turning point. When the pastor told him he had nothing to give, the poor man asked how someone whose table gleamed with silver could have nothing. Fournet took these words as a rebuke from God: he sold the silver, gave the money to the poor, and from then on lived in poverty and self-denial. He devoted himself to teaching the catechism, preaching the word of God, and visiting the sick, and people began to call him the good father.

When in 1791 the revolutionary authorities demanded that the clergy take the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, he refused. Removed from his parish and placed on the list of the proscribed, he hid for a time among his parishioners, and then, on his bishop’s orders and so as not to endanger those who sheltered him, he went to Spain. He spent about five years in Los Arcos, in the diocese of Pamplona. In 1797 he secretly returned, turned a barn into a chapel, and there celebrated Mass, heard confessions, and taught. Many times he was hunted in order to be killed. According to tradition, when soldiers closed in on him, he stood by a wayside cross with his arms outstretched, and they went away without harming him.

When the persecution ended, he rebuilt religious life in his parish and the surrounding area, preached missions, and taught Latin to boys preparing for the priesthood. While in hiding he had met Élisabeth Bichier des Ages. Around 1807 he gathered four other young women together with her, and so the Daughters of the Cross came into being, also called the Sisters of Saint Andrew. The sisters were to join prayer with work: to give a Christian education to girls, especially the poorest, and to care for the sick. When the congregation moved its house to La Puye in 1820, Fournet resigned as pastor, settled near the sisters, served as their spiritual director, and wrote a rule for them.

He died at La Puye on May 13, 1834. Benedict XV, proclaiming the decree on his heroic virtues in 1921, held him up as a model for pastors. Pope Pius XI beatified him on May 16, 1926, and canonized him on June 4, 1933, the solemnity of Pentecost, decreeing that the Church should commemorate him each year on May 13, the day of his birth into heaven.