Father Henri Caffarel declared venerable by Leo XIV

What if holiness also came through marital love? It was driven by this deep conviction that Father Henri Caffarel founded, in 1939, the Équipes Notre-Dame, an organization dedicated to supporting married couples to progress and live in their faith.

Declared venerable by Pope Leo

Born in 1903, Father Henri Caffarel had a moving encounter with God at the age of 20. He was ordained a priest in Paris in 1930. He joined the diocese of the capital, focusing on the training of young lay people within the Catholic Worker Youth and the organization of spiritual retreats for students. He then realizes that many newlyweds wonder about the place of their love for God in their relationship.

Helping married couples with their spirituality

It then gave birth to the Notre-Dame Teams, present today in 80 countries. The goal is to allow five or six married couples a monthly meeting with a priest in order to give them the means to advance spiritually despite the burdens of daily life.

The meeting translates into points of effort including the “duty to sit down”, a time to take stock together, under the gaze of God, of their love, to better know the heart of the other and to adjust to love each other better; or even prayer, a silent prayer detached from any worry or interior clutter. In 1945, he even created a magazine, The Golden Ringon marital and family spirituality, widely distributed in Catholic circles in France. In 1956 he launched the Marriage Preparation Centers which spread to many dioceses.

“With my husband, it helped us a lot during a difficult time. How many couples would not have lasted without what the father did,” testifies Marie d’Amonville. At 97 years old, the one who was a member of the Notre-Dame Teams with her husband for 14 years and worked with Henri Caffarel remembers their first meeting perfectly.

In 1967, the couple lived in Djibouti and had been involved in the country’s Notre-Dame Teams for two years. Louis d’Amonville, a soldier, was then called by God to retire from his profession to help a priest with material tasks and give him time to fulfill his priestly mission.

A demanding path to encounter God

The newlyweds leave everything and decide to follow a retreat to clarify this new project. The latter is led by Father Caffarel in his castle in Troussures (Oise). He then invites them to come work alongside him.

Faced with the couple’s hesitation, “he then had this extraordinary phrase: ‘Why shouldn’t I be the priest you want to help?’ And even though he didn’t know us, we were hired for ten years,” she laughs.

Thus begins a close five-year collaboration. The Notre-Dame Teams were recognized in 1975 by the Vatican as an “international Catholic association” and in 1992 by the Pontifical Council for the Laity as an “international association for the faithful under private law”.

To access this spiritual life, the path is nevertheless demanding: “For him, everything had to be done for the good Lord,” explains Marie d’Amonville. She remembers the conferences which began with ten minutes of prayer and silence, these rooms of 1000 people where “you could hear the flies flying”. And this ability he had to obscure the rest of the world when he began to pray, kneeling for half an hour without moving.

But these times of exchange help to make available to everyone times of prayer previously left to members of the clergy, too abstruse for the faithful: “He wanted everyone to have the same encounter with God to discover his love,” says Marie d’Amonville.

Father Caffarel died in 1996. His cause for beatification was opened on April 25, 2006 in Paris by Monsignor André Vingt-Trois. Now, his supporters are waiting for only one thing: the authentication of a miracle attributed to his intercession so that he can claim possible beatification.