Our Founders

Passionate for the Kingdom of God

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When God sees his people in need, he calls individuals to respond, gives them the grace of compassion, love,

and the strength to respond. He calls them and sends them forth.

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In the Church of the 19th century, Emmanuel d’Alzon, the founder of the Augustinians of the Assumption (Assumptionists) and the Oblates of the Assumption, was one of these men. Sensitive, by nature and by grace to the great changes in his country and the world, he suffered wherever God was threatened in man and man was threatened as image of God.

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His passion for the coming of God’s Kingdom, for Jesus Christ and for everything that Jesus Christ loves, urged him to share this first with the Laity, before sharing them with his brother and sister Assumptionists. Emmanuel d’Alzon made them aware of the great causes of God and the people of their time. He urged them to adopt new and daring paths: a mission within Eastern Christianity, journalism, pilgrimages, seminaries for the poor, etc.

But before all else, he invited them to “seek the reign of Jesus Christ in them and around them.”

On Sunday 21st November, l880, the feast of Mary’s Presentation, Venerable Emmanuel d’Alzon died leaving to his followers the strength of spirit that no tomb could hold down and no power on this earth could break.

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Even if history slates men in whatever way they chose, a religious force born from the Gospel finds the strength and ability to adapt and renew itself as time passes and events unfold, with the freedom to invent new and sometimes unexpected paths.

The Church validated the spiritual legacy of Emmanuel d’Alzon in December l991 awarding him the title of Venerable, the first stage in a future beatification hoped and prayed for.