Frederick Ozanam founded one of the most respected worldwide charities, the St Vincent de Paul Society, a lay voluntary, organisation which helps the poor discreetly. It has 850,000 members in 132 countries, including 11,000 in Ireland. Last year the society spent £16.5 million in this country. It was founded in 1833 by Mr Ozanam, when he was a 20-yearold student at the Sorbonne university in Paris. He was responding to a challenge from materialist and free-thinking colleagues, to show them the practical reality of his faith.
Mr Ozanam was also moved to found the charity by the squalid living conditions of workers in Paris, and the brutal repression of riots by silk industry workers - the canuts - for a minimum wage in 1831. He appropriated the motto of the 1789 Revolution: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," for the society. He once said he wanted to "embrace the whole world in a network of charity". Born in Milan on April 23rd, 1813, of French parents, Frederick Ozanam was the fifth of 14 children in a poor family. Eleven of his siblings died in childhood. He was a brilliant student and in his 20s secured two doctorates, in law and literature, at the Sorbonne.
He married Amelie Soulacroix in 1841 and their only child, Marie, was born in 1845. He ran for parliament, unsuccessfully, in 1848 on a then revolutionary platform calling for a mandatory minimum wage, family allowances, and pensions for workers. He died in 1853, at the age of 40.
The St Vincent de Paul Society arrived in Ireland in 1844, as the Famine began to take hold. Today it is the largest voluntary organisation in the country.
A delegation of 200 members from Ireland, led by the national president, Mr Noel Clear, attended the beatification ceremony in Notre Dame cathedral yesterday.
The Pope drew cheers from the crowd when he recalled that he had joined his local St Vincent de Paul group when he was a student in pre-war Poland.
