Saint Andrew Hubert Fournet

He was born on December 6, 1752, in the parish of Maillé near Poitiers. ²³⁴ The sources name the place differently: the Catholic Encyclopedia says Maillé, santiebeati the village of Saint-Pierre de Maillé, and a lecture published by the Diocese of Bayonne, following a notice written a year after his death, the hamlet of Pérusse in that parish. ²³⁴ His parents were well off and devout. ²⁴ The Bayonne lecture names them as Pierre Fournet de Thoiré and Florence Chasseloup, and notes that his father had four brothers who were priests. ⁴

He was a cheerful, restless boy who preferred play to work, and he was a boarder at the college of Châtellerault. ³⁴ The Bayonne lecture says his mother told him that he would one day be a priest and pray for her at the altar, and that he wrote on the first page of one of his books that it belonged to "André-Hubert, a good boy, who will never be a monk or a priest". ⁴ EWTN's Spanish page tells the same story of the inscription. ⁷

He studied law, but his handwriting was so poor that a career as a magistrate was out of the question; he then enlisted in the army without telling anyone. ⁴ When he called on his uncle, the parish priest of Saint-Pierre de Maillé, in uniform, the welcome, by the Bayonne lecture's account, was cold: the old priest said he had no nephew in the military. ⁴ His mother sent him instead to another uncle, a priest at Haims, and a visit there in the holidays turned him around. At twenty-two he gave up law for theology. ²⁴

He studied for the priesthood at Poitiers, at the seminary of Saint-Charles from 1774 to 1776, and was ordained in 1778. ³⁴ He served three years as curate to his uncle at Haims and then became parish priest of Saint-Pierre de Maillé, succeeding the other uncle. ²⁴

He was, by every account, a good priest who liked to live comfortably. ²⁴ The story that changed him is told in all three of the fuller sources. ²⁴⁷ He was expecting guests and had set a fine table when a beggar climbed the stairs and asked for alms. Fournet said he had no money. In the Bayonne lecture's version the man answered, "No money? And your table is covered with it", playing on the French word for silver. ⁴ Mariella Lentini's biography on santiebeati has him ask how that could be, with the table loaded with silverware. ² The lecture says Fournet took the words as Christ's own reproach and wept for a long time on the floor of the church. ⁴

From then on he lived differently. According to Lentini, he sold what he owned and gave it to the poor, slept on a straw mattress, ate bread and vegetables, and made his learned sermons simple enough for anyone to follow. ² His people came to call him "the Good Father". ²⁴

When the Revolution required the clergy to swear to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, he refused. ²⁴ He lost his parish and his house, and his life was in danger; santiebeati says he came close to being put to death several times. ²⁴ The Bayonne lecture adds that he was arrested on Good Friday, 1792, and barely escaped. ⁴ He went into exile in Spain, and from 1792 to 1797 he lived at Los Arcos, a small town in Navarre. ⁴ EWTN gives the exile as five years, and Lentini says he cared for the sick and for prisoners while he was there. ²⁷

In 1797 he came back alone, though the danger had not passed. ⁴ Dressed as a farm laborer, he said Mass in the woods and in barns, baptized, married and heard confessions in secret. ²⁴⁷ The Bayonne lecture records that there was a price on his head, and that once, pursued by three men, he came upon a wooden cross, stretched his arms out on it and waited to be killed; the men, taken aback, ran off. ⁴ His hiding place was a farm called Les Marsyllis. ⁴

One night in 1797 a young woman from a nearby manor came to the barn at Les Marsyllis for his Mass. ⁴⁵ She was Jeanne-Elisabeth Bichier des Ages, and in that crowd of peasants and tenant farmers she stood out. When the people made way for her, the priest, as the Bayonne lectures tell it, asked whether she thought he would leave the mothers and poor farmers who had walked for miles in order to hear her first. ⁴⁵ She answered that she would wait, and she was the last to make her confession, close to dawn. ⁵

He became her spiritual guide. ⁴⁵ The Roman Martyrology says she helped him carry on his ministry in secret. ¹ According to the lecture on her life, he urged her not to linger in a house of peace, because God was calling her to the fight: there were children, the sick and the dying, and she should come and teach and heal. ⁵ Pius XII, at her canonization, called him the guide of her personal and her apostolic life. ⁶

Peace returned slowly. He came back to Maillé in 1801 and moved into his presbytery again in 1802. ⁴ By the Bayonne lecture's account he had no wish to found a congregation, but he formed the small community that gathered around Elisabeth Bichier, and in February 1807 its first five sisters made their vows at Molante. ⁵ The Catholic Encyclopedia dates the foundation to 1806 at La Guimetière, near Béthines, and says the mother-house was set up at Maillé in December 1811. ³ With her he drew up its first rule; Pius XII said that she and "her good Father André Fournet" prepared the constitutions together. ⁵⁶ The first constitutions, as the lecture quotes them, gave the sisters the instruction of the rural poor and the care of the sick, whom they were to visit, comfort and prepare for death. ⁴

Pius XII drew a contrast between Fournet and Michael Garicoïts, the priest from the Pyrenees canonized with Bichier des Ages. ⁶ Garicoïts reminded him of an etching, he said; Fournet, of the soft pastels fashionable in his day. In the pope's words, translated here, an ardent charity "made strong as diamond the delicate, tender, almost timid and hesitant nature of the priest from Poitou". ⁶

In 1820 he resigned his parish and moved to La Puye, where the congregation had its new mother-house in an old priory of the Order of Fontevrault. ²³⁴ The Catholic Encyclopedia names him vicar-general of Poitiers. ³ He went on directing the sisters, and the Bayonne lecture says he also gathered children at Maillé to teach them, and helped form about forty priests for the diocese. ⁴ Lentini, and EWTN, both report that bread was multiplied at his blessing when the community was short of food. ²⁷

He died at La Puye on May 13, 1834. ²³⁴ By then, according to the notice of 1835 that the Bayonne lecture cites, the Daughters of the Cross numbered 424 sisters in 80 houses across 20 dioceses. ⁴ Pius XI canonized him in 1933, at Pentecost, according to the Bayonne lecture. ³⁴

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for him, so none is given here. ¹²³⁴ The congregation he founded with Saint Jeanne-Elisabeth Bichier des Ages is known after him as the Sisters of Saint Andrew. ³

Saint Andrew Hubert Fournet's feast is May 13, the day of his death. ¹²⁴ The Roman Martyrology, in the Italian text the Italian bishops publish, places his entry at "Puy-en-Vélay in the region of Poitiers"; the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Bayonne lecture give the place of his death as La Puye. ¹³⁴ His companion in the foundation, Saint Jeanne-Elisabeth Bichier des Ages, is kept on August 26. ⁵

His conversion did not come from a book or a sermon. A man at the door looked at his table and said what anyone could see. ²⁴ Fournet could have been offended, and instead he went into the church and wept. ⁴ The sources date the change in his life to that day, when he was already a parish priest. ²⁴

The courage came later and was of a plain kind. He would not swear an oath he believed was wrong, and when he could have stayed safe in Spain, he went back to the people he had left. ⁴ For years his ministry was conducted at night, in barns and woods, at the risk of his life. ²⁴⁷

Pius XII described him as delicate, almost timid, by nature. ⁶ That makes the barn at Les Marsyllis worth remembering for more than the meeting. The priest who made a young noblewoman wait behind the farm women was not being harsh; he was keeping his order of priorities, and she understood it. ⁴⁵ Out of that night came a congregation for the poor of the countryside, which the two of them built together. ³⁵