Ecclesiae Doctor?

 Although not yet so declared, S Louis Grignion de Montfort must surely be a Doctor of the Church. As well as founding religious congregations, he was a New Apostle of Britanny. His name and his ministry came before a greater number of Catholics more recently when S John Paul II took for his own motto the words of S Louis Totus Tuus, relating to our blessed Lady.

Today is his Festival, his memoria. (Appendix pro aliquibus locis.)

I wrote about him on this blog a couple of years ago; about how he came one quiet evening into the little Breton village of La Cheze; found the people people kneeling around a statue of our Lady, in the porch of the Church of La Trinite. Much moved, he gave the statue the title of Our Lady of Light. This devotion he spread (Notre Dame de Clarte; Itron Varia ar Sklerder). A year or so ago a friend of mine, who likes to explore Britanny, discovered (and she kindly photographed it for me) a little chapel of our Lady under this title, associated with the ... incredibly unusual ... figure of Father Sir Harry Trelawney, Baronet, who brought the cult to Cornwall (the shrine is now at Clacton on sea in Essex, together with a fine statue of Grignion.)

Father Faber translated S Grignion's masterpiece Treatise on the True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin:  in his Preface he wrote about how the Saint died at the age of forty three in 1716, after only sixteen years in the sacred priesthood. Faber himself died, exhausted by his labours, at the age of forty-nine. 

Is there, perhaps, a particular and wonderful charism in the Church, of great missionary priests, opponents of Jansenism, who drive themselves to an early death by their Gospel labours?