Leo Dehon was born in La Capelle on March 14, 1843. King Louis-Phillipe had been reigning for 13 years, that is to say, since the liberal bourgeoisie, appropriating the fruits of the popular revolution of 1830, set him on the throne. He was called the “Bourgeois King” and he deserved it well. He entrusted the government of France to François Guizot, a prominent bourgoise who was convinced that “political responsibilities should be entrusted to the elite”.

As a consequence of this thinking the electoral regime remained based on men of property. His policy favored the rich, the capitalists, and private interests. “Support the institutions and make yourselves rich!” was the watchword which he addressed to the bourgois Parliment.

Under the Guizot regime industrialization took off, with coke-fired blast furnaces, modernization of the textile industry, the steam engine, the creation of the railroad network and the multiplication of credit banks.

The other side of the picture was pauperism. Vagabonds were everywhere. Sickness and epidemics struck industrial towns such as Lille, Rouen, St. Quentin. A million abandoned infants were reported. 44% of the deaths were children under 5 years of age. In the big towns 35% of the population were destitute. Salaries were pitiful. A housing policy and social coverage were both nonexistent. All professional associations, all unions were forbidden; as was any State intervention regarding employer-worker relations. Eight year old children worked in the mines and in the textile factories 12 to 15 hours a day; 39% of the twenty year olds were completely illiterate. Popular uprisings were frequent and cruelly repressed.

What Fr. Dehon wrote on his arrival in St. Quentin in 1871 was completely true: “It is certain that this is a rotten society and all claims of the workers have a just foundation”.

Great ideological currents clashed with each other. The aristocrats regretted losing their past prestige and privileges. The liberals followed Guizot and grew rich. The democrates fought for liberty, equality, secularization. Some of them were socialists: they dreamed of living and of working in another way. As a consequence Godin's “phalansters” and “familisters” were developed in Guise, between St. Quentin and La Capelle. Proudhon fought against private property and saw, in work, the only capital. Marx called upon the proletariate to build a world without classes or State...

The Church was “present” among the lowly with a multitude of “good works”. But it was not capable of taking on all the difficulties of the workers, of urbanism, of techniques, in spite of men like Lamennais, Ozanam, Lacordaire, Montalembert... It worked tirelessly in defense of the “counter revolution” and often embodied the past.

It is in this context then, that on March 14, 1843, in La Capelle, a little market-town near Thiéra, to a family of comfortable, middleclass country people, Leo Dehon was born. His father, Jules Alexandre Dehon, transmitted his love of the land and his passion for cultivation and livestock to his son: “My father always found me ready to accompany him to his lands and even sometimes to go out riding on horseback”.

For Fr. Dehon, his mother, Fanny Dehon-Vandelet, was “the greatest of God's gifts”. It was she who conveyed to her son the love of the liturgy and of the Sacred Heart. He also often went with her to the old church of La Cappelle.

Because “his father had ambitions for his son”, in 1855 Leo went to the College of Hazebrouck.

In 1856, at Christmas, he decided to answer the call to the priesthood. His father was not enthusiastic about this and he sent his son to Paris so that he could prepare for a great career as a lawyer. Leo obeyed. In Paris he discovered the intellectual world, but also the poverty of the people and the insufficiency of active charity: “The first and foremost thing that the disinherited have a right to is social justice” he wrote. In 1864 Leo became a Doctor of Law. As he persisted in his vocation his father sent him to travel across Europe and the Middle East.

In 1865 he finally entered the seminary: the French seminary in Rome! Three years later, in 1868, he became a priest. 1869 saw him as a stenographer at Vatican Council I. He acquired his Doctorate in Canon Law, Philosophy and Theology brilliantly.

In 1871, on his return to L'Ai_ne, he was nominated seventh curate of the Basilica of St. Quentin. What did this humble nomination matter: he put all the ardor of his youth and his priesthood, all of his capacities and his knowledge, to the service of proclaiming the Gospel.

He was distraught by the poverty which he discovered and by the chasm which seperated the Church from the people.

He preached at retreats, calling upon the clergy: “You, priests, go to the people. Pius lay people bemoan your temerity. They will consider you as utopians. All these good people do not look with pleasure when indifferent or uninterested people tell us that religion is good for old people, women and children. But they will do everything, without question, provided they are told to. The people can hardly conceive that the priest comes out to do anything except to visit the sick and to lead funeral processions, and it is no wonder that people compare the priest to a funeral crow. The priest must intervene in the social throng, out of duty to justice and charity, but also for the rigorous accomplishment of his pastoral ministry. Go the the people, go to the living, go to men, and they will no longer consider you funeral birds”.

This is the spirit in which he founded The Apprentice Clubs, opened and directed Saint John's College at St. Quentin, participated in the reflection and the action of Christian employers like Mr. Harmel, wrote in many social magazines, and took part in social meetings all over France.

In this same spirit, anxious to surround himself with a new type of apostle, people who wrestled with the problems of the modern world and who were rooted in the Love of God, Father Dehon founded, in 1878, The Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart.

“The cult of the Sacred Heart”, he said, “is not a simple devotion, it is a true renewal of Christian life. The Kingdom of the Sacred Heart in society is the kingdom of justice, mercy and pity for the lowly, for the humble and for those who suffer. The spirit all my religious must have is that of poverty, obedience and chastity, for it is that of Jesus, on whom they nourish themselves every day”.

Father Dehon made himself a propogandist of the thoughts of Pope Leo XIII, especially those of the encyclical Rerum Novarum which regards the social question.

With the laws of seperation of Church and State the first Dehonian religious were dispersed beyond the frontiers. The Congregation thus went to settle in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Germany...

At the same time, in response to the appeals of the Church, Fr. Dehon sent missionaries to Latin America and Africa. The Congregation was functioning then in every continent.

A man of contemplation, a man of action and of the Church, Fr. Dehon died in Brussles on August 12, 1925. Buried in Saint Quentin, he rests today in the church of the parish of St. Martin which he virtually founded and which today is entrusted to the Dehonians.

Fr. Dehon is the source which the Spirit has made fecund and which has been spread in approximately forty countries in the world, thanks to the Congregation which he founded and to the thousands of lay people and religious who follow his ideal...

Fr. Dehon's ideal is first and formost an experience of Christ

His is an experience of faith centered on the pierced Heart of the Saviour, “expression of a love whose active presence is experienced in life”. His message is clear and contemporary: one cannot love the God of Love except through His Son present in the Eucharist and in the life of men, above all the poorest, the workers, the excluded.

Consequently, Fr. Dehon's ideal is fidelity to the Church

Pope Leo XIII took up the challenge of the worker's world with Rerum Novarum. That is the battle of the Church. It is therefore the battle of Fr. Dehon.

Rome called for missionaries to go out to new lands. Fr. Dehon sent his first religious, even though he had great need of them at his side.

His evolving Congregation was regarded with jealousy and opposition. It was suspected, even forbidden. He accepted, uniting himself with Christ on the cross and the words “It is accomplished”. In the very heart of these trials he wrote “Let us love the Church in herself, in her visible head, in her ministers..., let us venerate her as our mother!” It was this obedience, lived in faith, which was going to permit the true rebirth and growth of his Congregation.

Lastly, Fr. Dehon's ideal is his historic commitment in the world

At the same time as he was claiming the need for and striving for the spiritual rebirth of the ecclesiatical community, Fr. Dehon insisted on the urgency of going to the people: “This generation has changed Christ for us... He is no longer the Christ of the Poor, the Christ who carried out His apostolate among sinners and publicans... Our Christ, who inspired Paul and Francis Xavier, no longer speaks only to the sick and to women... Go, you the living, go out to men, go out to the people!” Father Dehon was able to gain the collaboration of numerous lay people, priests, religious, bishops... He preoccupied himself with formation on all levels and for everyone. He created a journal. He fought for his ideas, for a message... “For a century we have had plenty of pius people who pray like Moses on the mountain. We must join ourselves to the courageous men who fight on the plain like Joshua!”

As Fr. Dehon followed Christ, may we in our turn live the ideal which he has left us. And so, like him, we will take up the challenges of our time.