St. Louis de Montfort

Summary

Catholic Saints – St. Louis de Montfort (April 28, 2026)

Host: Dr. Jessica Yule
Guest: Dr. John Seehorn

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Episode Overview

This episode of "Catholic Saints" explores the spiritual legacy of St. Louis de Montfort, focusing on his unique approach to prayer—particularly his deep devotion to the Rosary—and how his teaching can inspire everyday Catholics. Marking his feast day, the discussion uncovers the distinctive spirituality of the French school and practical insights for incorporating de Montfort’s methods into personal and communal prayer today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Life and Context of St. Louis de Montfort

• Born: 1673 in western France
• Died: 1716
• Historical Impact:
  • Renowned for developing and popularizing the devotion of Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary.
  • Deeply influenced by the French school of spirituality during seminarian training at Saint Sulpice.
• Key Influence:
  • French school emphasized a profound sense of human limitation and sinfulness not to cause despair, but to highlight God’s mercy and raise our gaze to Him (03:28, Dr. Seehorn).

2. Distinctive Spirituality: God’s Wisdom & Our Response

• Distance Between God and Man:
  • Our limitations and sin create a sense of distance, but “that's not a cause for despair... It's actually to raise our eyes to God because He has bridged both of those gaps. And specifically... by his wisdom, which is another name for his eternal Word, His Son, Jesus Christ.” (04:49, Dr. Seehorn)
• Wisdom as Christ:
  • St. Louis channeled the Biblical focus on divine wisdom, particularly seeing Jesus as Wisdom Incarnate—the bridge between God’s infinitude and our finiteness.

3. St. Louis’ Approach to Popular Devotion: Preaching and the Rosary

• Accessibility:
  • Traveled as a “vagabond preacher” bringing profound spiritual truths to ordinary, often poorly catechized Catholics.
  • Used the Holy Rosary as an accessible means to meditate on the mysteries of faith for all, regardless of education (07:34; 08:24).

Quote:
“He really saw [the Rosary] as like this great equalizer. … This really was for him a power and is for us a powerful way of entering deeply into prayer, deeply into intimacy with our Lord.”
— Dr. Seehorn, 09:21

4. Practical Teaching on the Rosary

• First Practice: The Our Father as Identity
  • Saying “Our Father” reminds us that we are children of God, called to love him, our neighbor, and detach from earthly things (10:51).

“Just saying Our Father should be more than enough to teach us to love God and our neighbor and to be detached from the things of this world.”
— Dr. Seehorn, 11:18

• Second Practice: The Hail Mary as Thanksgiving
  • Focus on the “angelic salutation” (first half): Reliving the great event of the Incarnation and Mary’s fiat.
  • Approach each Hail Mary as an act of gratitude and adoration of the Trinity through Mary’s “yes.”

“A single Hail Mary said properly is worth more than 150 said badly.”
— Dr. Seehorn quoting St. Louis, 13:56

• Third Practice: Meditation on the Mysteries
  • The heart of the Rosary isn’t mere repetition, but contemplation of the life and virtues of Christ—“so that we won't say or think or do anything that isn't in conformity with that model” (14:47).
  • Meditating on the mysteries helps us echo St. Paul’s words: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (15:40).

5. Approach to Practice: Realism and Encouragement

• St. Louis was “down to earth and realistic”: He understood the challenge of daily prayer and distractions.
• Encouraged spreading the decades throughout the day, and never letting Rosary obligations interfere with one’s duties in life or vocation.

“If praying the rosary would ever get in the way of fulfilling the duties of your vocation… don't even hesitate. Just offer the fulfillment of that duty to the Lord.”
— Dr. Seehorn, 16:49

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• St. Louis’ Vision of Transformation:

  “What a marvelous transformation is possible. Dust into light, uncleanness into purity, sinfulness into holiness, Creature into creator, into man, into God.”
  — St. Louis de Montfort, as quoted by Dr. Seehorn, 07:51

• On the Importance of the Rosary:

  “Beware of thinking of the rosary as something of little importance, as do ignorant people and even several great but proud scholars.”
  — Dr. Seehorn paraphrasing St. Louis, 09:21

• On Rote Prayer:

  “A single Hail Mary said properly is worth more than 150 said badly.”
  — Dr. Seehorn quoting St. Louis, 13:56

• Meditating on the Life of Christ:

  “Christians are always to have before our eyes the life and virtues of Jesus Christ so that we won't say or think or do anything that isn't in conformity with that model.”
  — Dr. Seehorn, 14:41

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:01 — Overview of St. Louis de Montfort’s life and spiritual context
• 03:28 — Explanation of the French school of spirituality and the idea of distance from God
• 07:34 — St. Louis’ practical approach: making sublime truths accessible, especially through the Rosary
• 10:51 — Dr. Seehorn’s three practical teachings of de Montfort on the Rosary
• 14:23 — Visualizing the Rosary as a meditation on Christ’s life and virtues
• 16:17 — Guidance for daily practice and balancing prayer with life’s duties

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Summary Takeaways

• St. Louis de Montfort, though famed for Marian consecration, is a master teacher on connecting lofty theological truths to practical, daily prayer.
• His Rosary spirituality is accessible, deeply Christocentric, and open to all, emphasizing the transformation possible by grace.
• Even amid the pressures of modern life, his practical advice encourages perseverance, reminding Catholics to trust in God’s patience and love.

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Final Blessing:

“Thank you St. Louis de Montfort. Pray for us.” (17:52)

Transcript

[A]

You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

[B]

Hello and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. I'm Dr. Jessica Yule, and I'm joined today by Dr. John Seehorn. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming.

[C]

Thanks so much for having me.

[B]

Can you tell us a little bit about your favorite course that you teach in the graduate school?

[C]

Oh, that's a tough one. So I've been a member of the faculty here since 2015, have taught a variety of courses, but I think my favorite has got to be the Gospels, right? The Gospels are the first fruits of all of sacred Scripture. They're our principal witness to the life and teachings of our Lord. And of course, they're central to our liturgy, to our worship, to our prayer. Every time I teach them, I see new things, and it's such a joy to get to share those things with students.

[B]

That's great. Sounds really, really exciting. Now, today we're going to be trying something a little bit different on Catholic Saints. We One way that the Saints help us is through modeling a life of prayer that brought them closer to God. By learning from the ways they prayed, we too can grow in our relationship with God. During this episode, we're going to learn from St. Louis de Montfort. So let's go ahead and jump in, but first we're going to do a little bit of a recap about his life. There is another really wonderful episode, if you want to delve deeper into his life and legacy, if you want to go and give a listen to that episode. So, Dr. Seehorn, could you tell us a little bit about when St. Louis de Montfort lived and some of the historical context?

[C]

Sure, absolutely. So St. Louis was born in western France in 1673. He lived a relatively short but very full life. He went home to Our Lord in 1716. And he's probably most famous today for his development and promotion of a devotion of total consecration to Jesus through Mary. But that's really only one. It's a very important part, but it's really only One part of St. Louis sort of approach to his faith and his way of inviting others to enter more deeply into their faith in Christ.

[B]

Yeah, that's wonderful. And we're going to be talking more about that in just a minute. Today is his feast day, April 28th. And so let's go ahead and dive into what he can teach us about Prayer. So when we think about saints and their legacy of prayer, we think sometimes about Saints. We know St. Ignatius of Loyola, for example, whose prayer was part of his journey of coming closer to the Lord. I'm sure there is something that is very, if not similar in form, maybe similar in that it connects directly to his own experience for St. Louis de Montfort. Could you talk a little bit about how his unique prayer grew out of his experience?

[C]

Certainly, yeah. Thank you for the question. So, by all accounts, St. Louis was very pious as a child. There are beautiful stories about his habit of making visits to the Blessed Sacrament on his way to or from school, sometimes maybe staying longer than his playmates were comfortable with. He had a very rich sense early on of the presence of Jesus, of his intimacy with Mother Mary, and the ways in which Our lady draws us close to Jesus. When he was, I think, 11, he went to be educated by Jesuits, and there were a number of Jesuits who had a big influence on him. But I think the most important was his seminary studies at Saint Sulpice, where he was really formed by what's now often called the French school of spirituality. And there actually are a few aspects of the French school that I think are helpful to get a handle on as we seek to learn about our own prayer from St. Louis. And maybe the first thing is simply the profound sense of distance that the French school authors understood there to be between us and God. And that actually in two ways. First, just due to our status as creatures, the recognition that we are limited, that we are changeable, that we are very, very finite, and that God is none of those things, that God is infinite, that he is all holy, that he is eternal. And so there's a kind of sense of distance simply from that. And then, of course, on top of that, we've turned away from God by our sin. And so, again, the French school has a very vivid sense of both of those realities. But this is the critical point. That's not a cause for despair. Right. Sometimes if you read authors in the French school, including St. Louis, you'll see things that are a little bit unpalatable to us about there's nothing good in me and I'm a worm, and so on and so forth. And so it's really critical to understand that when that language is deployed, it's not for the sake of sort of dragging us down. It's actually to raise our eyes to God because He has bridged both of those gaps. And specifically, and St. Louis never tired of talking about this. God bridges both of those Gaps between us by his wisdom. Right. Which is another name for his eternal word, His Son, Jesus Christ. Right. So if he created all things in wisdom, then in some way, as his creatures, we can already be connected to him through by that wisdom. And then even after we've turned away from him by sin, he's repaired that relationship by sending his wisdom as man, wisdom incarnate. And it's really critical, again, to recognize the value, the incredible treasure that St. Louis saw in divine wisdom. So he loved the book of wisdom in Sacred Scripture. He loved everything he could find in the Bible about wisdom, especially about Jesus as wisdom. He would collect sayings of Jesus from the Gospels as sort of the guide of wisdom for our lives.

[B]

That's beautiful. Wow. And I love that light that you cast on some of that language because it can be shown how beautiful and how merciful God is. That's where we should be putting our focus. And thank you for really delving into that for us. I think that is something all of us can go back to and. And use to grow deeper in our relationship with God. What unique aspects of the prayer life of St. Louis, in addition to this, or maybe inspired by this, have the faithful adopted into their own spiritual lives as of now?

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. So that question is, again, something that St. Louis himself thought about a lot. Right. So I mentioned again, that sense of distance and of smallness and even of worthlessness before God. But for St. Louis, that was really an index of the grandeur of our vocation. So I'd like to share a little quotation from one of his works. This is from the Secret of Mary. He says, what a marvelous transformation is possible. Dust into light, uncleanness into purity, sinfulness into holiness, Creature into creator, into man, into God. Right. It's simply astonishing. And St. Louis spent the last decade of his life as a kind of vagabond preacher. And he would preach missions in villages and towns in western France. And he thought a lot about how to make these kind of very sublime, elevated, maybe to some people, seemingly inaccessible truths accessible to very ordinary people. Often people who are uneducated, who've been baptized, who've been maybe brought up in the church but weren't very well catechized. He couldn't really sit down and give them lectures about philosophy and theology that he could expect them to retain and meditate on regularly. So the answer that he came up with in large measurements was the Holy Rosary.

[B]

That's always the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of St. Louis de Montfort. Can you talk more about that and how we can really go into the beauty and the power of it even more maybe than we already are doing as faithful.

[C]

Yes, absolutely. So maybe the first thing to say is, praise God, that it comes to our mind and that there's so much popularity in the rosary today. It wasn't that long ago that we kind of went through a period where I think to some people, the rosary seemed kind of like low class. Like, you know, that's. That's for, like, simple Christians. But, you know, if. If you know your faith, you don't. You don't need something like the rosary. And that was something that St. Louis actually combated in his own time. In fact, he says, beware of thinking of the rosary as something of little importance, as do ignorant people and even several great but proud scholars. Right. So he was dealing with, you know, maybe a certain amount of condescension that some people had toward the rosary. And he really saw it, I think, almost as like this great equalizer. Right. This really was for him a power and is for us a powerful way of entering deeply into prayer, deeply into intimacy with our Lord. And it's really not something to be. To be despised.

[B]

Yeah, it's beautiful. I find myself saying that word so often today because really, I did not know much about St. Louis de Montfort. And the more I learn about him, the more I see how important he is today for us. And I wonder if you could share with us some practical ways that we can apply some of these things that he's teaching about prayer.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. And even specific to the rosary. Maybe there are three things I could share that I find really practical for my own prayer of the rosary that St. Louis really urged in his teaching. The first is something that he says about praying the Our Father. Right. Which we say at the beginning of each decade of the rosary. And when St. Louis talks about the prayer of the Our Father in the rosary, he emphasizes the way in which the Our Father reminds us of who we are. Okay? So he writes at one point that when we say the Our Father and begin with those words, Our Father, we should remember that we have God for Our Father, so we are all brothers and heaven is our homeland and our heritage. And then he goes on, and I love this. This should be more than enough. Just saying Our Father should be more than enough to teach us to love God and our neighbor and to be detached from the things of this world. So at the beginning of each decade, by starting with Our Father, you have this kind of centering reminder of who you are as a son or daughter of the Father. The second thing is what he says about the Hail Mary, right, which we repeat 10 times with each decade. And I especially want to focus on what he says about the first half of the Hail Mary, right, Which is often called the angelic salutation, right? Because the first part of it is based on what Gabriel said to Our lady when he appeared to her at the Annunciation, right? Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy Womb, Jesus. And St. Louis loved to meditate on this moment of the incarnation of the angelic salutation of Our Lady's. Yes. To God's plan to bring his Son into the world through her. St. Louis says that this is the greatest event in the whole history of the world, right? This is how we are redeemed. This is how peace is restored between God and us. And Our lady is God's chosen instrument for this to take place. And so the disposition that he recommends to us, in part, when we pray the Hail Mary, especially that first part of it, is one of praise, right? Worshiping God the Father, thanking him for loving the world so much that he sent his Son to save us, blessing the Son for becoming incarnate to be our Savior, glorifying the Holy Spirit for forming Christ in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. So he says that when we pray the Hail Mary, we should do it in a spirit of deep thankfulness, making acts of faith, hope and love and thanksgiving for the priceless gift of salvation. So that's the second thing. And I find that really helpful to remind myself. When we pray the Hail Mary, it's not just rote words, right? This is an act of adoration of the Blessed Trinity for the gift of salvation that God gave to us through our lady's. Yes. St. Louis really insists on this point that we shouldn't just be rattling off Hail Marys. He actually says a single Hail Mary said properly is worth more than 150 said badly. That's a nice thing to remember.

[B]

That is a nice. Yeah.

[C]

And I guess the last thing is something that St. John Paul II and before him, St. Paul VI, really emphasized about praying the Rosary and the importance of meditating on the mysteries. Right? Not again, just counting off the prayers, but pondering those 15. And now, thanks to St. John Paul II, 20 mysteries of the Rosary. And this is one of the key ways in which, for St. Louis, the rosary made these insights of the French School available to everybody. Because for the French school, If divine wisdom is how we're reunited to that God who is so far above us, then the entire task of our lives is to be able to say, with St. Paul, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And St. Louis completely endorsed that. And he saw the rosary as a very powerful tool in this regard. Why? Because it directs our attention to meditating on Christ, on his life, on his virtues. He compares us when we pray the rosary to a painter, right, who wants to paint a portrait. And so he makes sure that the model is right in front of his eyes, and he checks that model with each stroke that he makes on his canvas. And in the same way, Christians are always to have before our eyes the life and virtues of Jesus Christ so that we won't say or think or do anything that isn't in conformity with that model. So praying the rosary gives us this habit of thinking through, praying through, meditating on the life of Christ, because that's the life that the Holy Spirit wants to live in us.

[B]

Yeah, that's beautiful. Again. Okay, my favorite word for the day. I want to ask you if you have any closing thoughts for us.

[C]

No, I think that's it. I mean, well, okay, here's maybe one closing thought. One of the things I really appreciate about St. Louis teaching on the rosary is how down to earth and realistic and humane it is. Right? He does think that grown ups should be able to pray. What for him were all 15 decades of the rosary, every day it would be even more, for us, it would be 20. But he says, look, spread it out over the day. Don't try to do it all at once. It's really difficult to pray the rosary without distraction. And he says, listen, if praying the rosary would ever get in the way of fulfilling the duties of your vocation, your state and life, you know, as a husband or a wife or a father, a mother, whatever it is, don't even hesitate. Just offer the fulfillment of that duty to the Lord. So he's really trying to head off scrupulosity, but just encouraging people with kind of the boldness of the children of God to pick up the rosary and to stick with it and to trust that they will be drawn closer to our Lord.

[B]

Thank you. And again, if you would like to listen to more content on this feast day of St. Louis de Montfort, you can go to our other episode on his life and legacy. And if you've enjoyed this episode with its special focus on praying with the saints, please let us know by subscribing or leaving a review thank you for joining us on Catholic Saints. And thank you Dr. Seehorn, for being with us. Thank you St. Louis de Montfort.

[C]

Pray for us.

[A]

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