Book The Magnificat

Born in Ri, in the diocese of Sées, John Eudes demonstrated, from his earliest childhood, such pure piety and such profound humility that, in order to complete his spiritual formation, he joined the Congregation of the Oratory at a very young age.

In 1643, he left the Oratorians to found the Congregation known as the Eudists, whose development was considerable from the beginning. The pages presented here are excerpts from Chapter X of a work he composed late in his life, entitled The Admirable Heart of the Most Holy Mother of God, in which he deals in detail with the reasons for devotion to the Heart of Mary.

But the chapter in question, in which he comments on the Magnificat and sings the wonders of the "faithful Virgin," was finished a few weeks before his death. "Today, the twenty-fifth of July, 1660," he writes in his memoirs, "God has granted me the grace to finish my book."