Venerable Louis-Marie Baudouin

Louis-Marie Baudouin (2 August 1765 - 12 February 1835) was a French Roman Catholic priest who was the founder of the Sons of Mary Immaculate and the Ursulines of Jesus. Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed him as venerable on 20 December 2012. Louis-Marie Baudouin was born in Montaigu, Vendée on 2 August 1765, the last of eight children. His father, a gardener at the Château de Montaigu, died when Louis-Marie was about two years old. As a boy, he became a chorister in the collegiate church of St. Maurice. The canons undertook the expense of his education with a teacher in the town. When his mother died in 1780, he was looked after by his eldest sister Marie. He then went to live with his eldest brother, Pierre Martin, curate of Chantonnay. When Pierre Martin was made Curé of Angles in 1782, his younger brother accompanied him. That October Louis-Marie entered the Seminary of Luçon. He was ordained as a Catholic priest at Saint-Malo on 19 September 1789. He was assigned as curate to his brother, now Curé of Luçon. Besides preaching, he tended the sick at the hospital. In 1790 Baudouin refused to swear to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of the new French government during the French Revolution. He became a hunted and proscribed priest who heard confessions and celebrated Mass in an underground cellar. After arrest and seven months imprisonment, he was released and went into exile to Spain on 9 September 1792 along with 234 other priests. He spent most of it in Toledo, where Archbishop Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana sheltered over 400 French priests. While there, his brother's health failed and Pierre Martin Baudouin died in Toledo at the age of forty-seven. While in Spain, Louis-Marie became a skilled lace maker, should he need to obtain a workman's passport to return to France. In August 1797, he and his colleague Father Lebédesque made their way to Bordeaux, where friends brought them to Libourne.