St. Eugene de Mazenod was born in 1782 in Aix-en-Provence, France. His father, Charles Antoine, was a member of the French nobility and the President of the Aix parliament. His mother, Marie-Rose Joannis, was affiliated with the expeditiously evolving bourgeois merchants.

Two hundred years ago the French aristocrat Eugene de Mazenod gathered a few priests into a kind of evangelical team in southeastern France. They went into neglected, impoverished parishes preaching in the local dialect of Provençal, not French, sharing their lives and the Gospel with poor people who had been left behind by modern France.