Returns to His Diocese

So, he retired to Saint Lazare and, after a period of prayer and silence, took up his missionary work once more in his own diocese. Crowds filled the churches and no one could keep count of the number of conversions. Sometimes de Montfort’s simple gesture of placing a crucifix before the assembled people and asking them to venerate it, produced an amazing change even in indifferent and hostile congregations. There are those who would dismiss it as mass hysteria, but the incredible influence of the man on his contemporaries cannot be so lightly explained.

He had no pulpit oratory to win the admiration of the crowds and always spoke of the fundamentals of the faith in the most straightforward terms. Frequently he simply recited the fifteen decades of the Rosary with the people and then gave them the Crucifix to kiss. Yet the results of his missions were astounding and the conversions made proved, in most cases, solid and lasting. Again there is a modern touch—he composed some 160 poems, and a number of rousing hymns, using many of them as a simple and effective means of instruction. Even in the years of revolutionary France, these were to keep a flame of Christianity alive in the hearts of the people. His own nuns chanted one of these hymns as they traveled in the tumbrils (carts) to the guillotine, so that even, the depraved mob felt strangely moved and clamored for their release.