page_title: Basil Moreau
section_title: Ministry
hierarchical_section_title: Basil Moreau / Ministry
caption_attribution_description: English: Campus of the University of Notre Dame
context_page_description: Basil Moreau, CSC was the French priest who founded the Congregation of Holy Cross from which three additional congregations were founded, namely the Marianites of Holy Cross, the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and the Sisters of Holy Cross. Father Moreau was beatified on September 15, 2007 in Le Mans, France.
context_section_description: In 1823, he became professor of philosophy at the minor seminary of Tessé. Then in 1825 he taught at St Vincent Seminary and later became the vice-rector and spiritual director.  
  As most of the pastors and teachers in France before the Revolution were priests and religious forced into exile, by the 1820s most of the nation was ill-catechized, illiterate, and without benefit of the sacraments. Restoration of the Church was the principal theme and work of Fr. Moreau's life. As a young priest and throughout his life, Basil was an effective preacher who preached parish missions and offered the sacraments on an itinerant basis to rekindle the neglected faith in towns and villages throughout the region.
  In 1835, he was assigned to be the assistant superior of the seminary at Le Mans, where he was a popular and inspiring professor of theology.  He founded a group of priests within the Diocese of Le Mans to assist diocesan clergy in his various endeavors to re-invigorate the Church, especially preaching parish missions.  He called them the Society of Auxiliary Priests.  In the same year, an older priest of the same diocese, Fr. Jacques-Francois Dujarié, who fifteen years before, in 1820, had founded a band of young men to re-establish and teach in the schools throughout the region, handed responsibility for them over to Fr. Moreau on account of his failing health.  While not technically religious because they had not made a novitiate or taken public vows, these young men were known as the Brothers of St. Joseph.
caption: Basil Moreau in a stained glass window in Stinson-Remick hall at the University of Notre Dame
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