With the fall of Napoleon, Eugene was now able to openly form his youth association into what it really was: a sodality or congregation. In order to give it some authority, he wrote to the Pope asking for a formal approval and the granting of spiritual benefits. With the Pope’s go-ahead, the local Bishop could give a diocesan approval. His diary entry of September 1814 recalls this event:
As the number of congregants was increasing every day, and piety was making tangible progress among them, the Reverend Director had the idea of consolidating still more the good done in the Association, and encouraging those who belonged to it in the practice of virtue, by petitioning the Sovereign Pontiff to erect this worthy society by his apostolic authority into a Congregation, and to grant it a certain number of partial and even plenary indulgences. He therefore dispatched the following petition to Rome, in Italian:
Most Holy Father,
Charles Joseph Eugene de Mazenod, priest, having sorrowfully discerned that by a deplorable effect of the baneful influence of mistaken philosophy the Christian faith was in danger of perishing in France, conceived the plan of combating with all his strength such a frightful disorder.
To succeed in this enterprise, he formed a Congregation composed of young men to whom he gave the necessary means to keep themselves in the fear of the Lord, to know and practise virtue.
The Lord having deigned to bless the efforts of his zeal, and the number of congregants being on the increase as well as their piety, the aforesaid priest, to strengthen ever more the good that is done in the congregation, most humbly petitions His Holiness to approve this Congregation under the name of the Association of Christian Youth, under the direction for the present of the aforesaid Charles Joseph Eugene de Mazenod, and at the same time to deign to grant the following indulgences […]
The rescript was placed before the eyes of our Holy Father the Pope in his audience of September 24 by His Eminence Cardinal Galleffi, and His Holiness deigned to grant without restriction the indulgences that were requested for a period of thirty years and authorized the Ordinary to erect the Congregation, granting him for this purpose all the necessary faculties […]
Diary of the Aix Christian Youth Congregation, September 1814, O.W. XVI