Blessed Frédéric Ozanam

Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam was a French Catholic literary scholar, lawyer, journalist and equal rights advocate. He founded with fellow students the Conference of Charity, later known as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris in 1997. His feast day is 9 September. Frédéric Ozanam was born on Friday, 23 April 1813, to Jean and Marie Ozanam. He was the fifth of 14 children, one of only three to reach adulthood. His family, which had distant Jewish connections, had been settled in the region around Lyon, France, for many centuries. An ancestor of Frédéric, Jacques Ozanam (1640–1717), was a noted mathematician. Jean Ozanam, Frédéric's father, had served in the armies of the First French Republic, but with the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the founding of the First French Empire, he turned to trade, to teaching, and finally to medicine. Ozanam was born in Milan, but brought up in Lyon. In his youth, he experienced a period of doubt regarding the Catholic faith, during which he was strongly influenced by one of his teachers at the Collège de Lyon, the priest Joseph-Mathias Noirot (known usually as the Abbé Noirot). His religious instincts showed themselves early, and in 1831 he published Réflexions sur la Doctrine de Saint-Simon, a pamphlet against Saint-Simonianism, which attracted the attention of the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine who was born in the area. Ozanam also found time to help organize and write for the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, a lay Catholic organization founded in the city with the aim of supporting Catholic missionaries, many of whom came from the area. That autumn he went to study law in Paris, where he suffered a great deal from homesickness.