Who was Fr. Olivier Maire, the Catholic Priest Murdered in France?

Fr. Maire, 60, was a popular leader of retreats.

One participant in a retreat that he led in 2011 wrote: “I appreciated his availability, his attentive listening to suggestions, but also the freedom with which he expressed his desires in different areas. Each Eucharist was an intense moment of prayer and thanksgiving.”

Another commented: “I lived a week of calm and renewal thanks to the beauty of the place, the quality of the moments of prayer, the depth and simplicity of Olivier Maire.”

In 2016, the priest was interviewed by the French Catholic television station KTO in Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, in a broadcast marking the 300th anniversary of de Montfort’s death in 1716.

On Oct. 11, 2020, Maire preached at a Mass marking the 300th anniversary of the arrival of Blessed Marie Louise of Jesus in Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre. Together with de Montfort, she founded the Daughters of Wisdom, a female religious congregation.

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He said: “This is what Marie Louise could have said to everyone this morning: share your life. Live a life of sharing with others, don’t waste your life by living it alone, isolated, protected from the world, protected from others -- you have to protect yourself from the virus but not from others.”

“This symbiosis with the world in which we live, this world of exclusion as Pope Francis would say, this world of the periphery, is what Marie Louise experienced. Fraternal life, the pope’s last encyclical (Fratelli tutti), reminds us of this, living in symbiosis with the other, fraternal life and living in symbiosis with God himself.”

“Let us dare to sit down for a time of fraternal sharing, let us dare to sit down with the poorest, the excluded, and the rejects of humanity.”

This is a developing story.