Saint Jacques Berthieu

Jacques Berthieu, SJ (also James; 27 November 1838 – 8 June 1896) was a French Jesuit priest and missionary in Madagascar. He was murdered during the Menalamba rebellion of 1896. He is the first martyr of Madagascar to be beatified. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. Jacques Berthieu was born on 27 November 1838 in the area of Montlogis, in Polminhac, in the Auvergne in central France, the son of deeply Christian farmers of modest means. His childhood was spent working and studying, surrounded by his family. The early death of an older sister left him the oldest of six children. He studied at the seminary of Saint-Flour and was ordained to the priesthood for the diocese on 21 May 1864. His bishop, de Pompignac, named him vicar in Roannes-Saint-Mary, where he replaced an ill and aged priest. He served as a diocesan priest for nine years. Because of his desire to evangelize distant lands, and to ground his spiritual life in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, he sought admission to the Society of Jesus and entered the novitiate in Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, on 31 October 1873, at the age of almost thirty-five. He sailed from the port of Marseille in 1875 to two islands in the vicinity of Madagascar that were then under French jurisdiction, Réunion and Sainte-Marie, where he studied Malagasy and prepared himself for the mission. The beginnings of his missionary life were not easy for this 37-year-old Jesuit. Climate, language, and culture were all totally new things which made him exclaim, "My uselessness and my spiritual misery serve to humiliate me, but not to discourage me. I await the hour when I can do something, with the grace of God". Mindful of his farming background, he was happy to cultivate the kitchen garden that supplied the station. He and two other Jesuits and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny formed a missionary team. There he was engaged in pastoral work for five years, until March 1880.