The following video about Blessed Frederic Ozanam was posted by the Catholic Faith Network in their series “Celebrating the Saints”.
Frederic Ozanam
No One Succors the Poor Better than the Poor Themselves • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Citizens of every condition, You, to whom the rigor of the times has taken away you the superfluous, you, who lack...
Lessons of Frederic Ozanam: Charity and Community Service
“Ozanam’s definition of Christian charity involved treating poor persons as equals to increase social engagement and transform all of society.”
To Grieve with the Evils of the Poor • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
[If so are now] the evils, not of a single district, but of several districts of Paris; not only in Paris but in Lyon, in Rouan, and in all the manufacturing cities of the North, [...] imagine what winter will bring, when the hardness of the station suspends the...
Protecting the Children • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
One is terrified, and rightly, by that multitude of children growing up for disorder and for crime, with no other education than the examples of the theatre and the temptations of the public square. It is not well known that in district 12, four thousand boys and...
The Dignity of the Poor • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
In these foul cellars and garrets, sometimes next door to sloth and vice we have often come upon the loveliest domestic virtues, on a refinement and intelligence that one does not always meet with under gilded ceilings; a poor cooper, of past seventy years of age,...
To Comply with the Precepts or to Be Truly Christian • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
It is easier to use an uplifting language, to fulfill certain positive precepts, to reject certain pleasures, than to be deeply filled with the evangelical spirit, to keep it in the depths of the soul to ennoble it, purify it, and improve it; in short: to reproduce it...
Being on the Side of the Workers • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Of course, the districts of Saint-Jacques and of Jardin-des-Plantes do not always give the spectacle of the same desolation. We know there shopping streets, poor but livable houses, narrow but well-kept rooms that retain remains of an old slack, waxed furniture, white...
What Rich Man will be Saved? • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
We need not dwell on those amongst them who are better off [at Lyonnais Street]; those who, for six persons, can supply two beds, into which are huddled pellmell the sick and the healthy, boys of eighteen with girls of sixteen. Let's not talk about the ruin of the...
The Situation of the Poor in our Cities • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
On either side of a filthy sewer rise houses five stories high, many of which shelter fifty families. Low, damp, and noxious rooms; [...] no paper, often not a single piece of furniture, hides the nakedness of the wretched walls. In a house of the Rue des Lyonnais we...
The Privilege of Serving the Poor • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Those who have the privilege of distributing the public help [...] go, for instance, to the twelfth arrondissement, one of the strongholds of the insurrection, and out of about ninety thousand inhabitants they find eight thousand families inscribed on the list of the...
The Small Graces We Receive from God • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
We are not sufficiently grateful for God's little benefits. We thank Him for having created and redeemed us, and given us good parents, and a wife, and beloved children, and for so often giving us Himself in the Sacrament of the Altar. But besides these powerful...
