Draft:Louis Gergaud
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Father Louis Marie Gergaud (22 March 1832 - 1 October 1873) was one of the five Breton missionary priests to Louisiana who made a free and willing sacrifice of their lives in the 1873 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Shreveport, Louisiana. The group is collectively known as the Shreveport Martyrs. On December 8, 2020, Bishop Francis Malone of the Diocese of Shreveport declared him to be a Servant of God, opening the diocesan phase of inquiry into a Cause of Beatification and Canonization.[1] In 2022, the Vatican's Dicastery for the Causes of Saints permitted Father Gergaud and the other four Shreveport Martyrs to proceed for consideration as a single Cause.[2] Very Rev. Peter B. Mangum serves as the Episcopal Delegate for the Cause
Louis Marie Gergaud was born in Heric, Brittany, France, a small medieval community near Nantes to parents Sebastian and Anne.[3] He attended the Grand Seminary of Nantes and was ordained a priest in the seminary chapel on 23 September 1854.[4] Just a few weeks later in October 1854, Gergaud was among the first group of Breton missionary recruits that Bishop Augustus Marie Martin brought to the newly erected Diocese of Natchitoches.[5] Bishop Martin assigned him to the "missions of the Ouachita," a region of northeast Louisiana that incorporates the city of Monroe. There, Father Gergaud built the first St. Matthew's Church, and steadily began to grow the Catholic presence in a mostly Protestant region of the state.[6]
During the antebellum period, Father Gergaud baptized over 200 slaves in northeast Louisiana, documented in a separate sacramental register that he maintained in the files of the church. In letters he wrote to his bishop in Nantes, Bishop Antoine Jacquemet, Father Gergaud related his struggles to understand American slavery and likened his mission work to that of "Father Claver," a Jesuit missionary to the New World who ministered to the enslaved. (Saint Peter Claver). [7]
Father Gergaud's presence often evoked open Protestant hostility in the early years of his ministry in northeast Louisiana.[8] All the while he continued to grow missions in Bastrop, Lake Providence, and even extended his mission visits into southern Arkansas and western Mississippi. In 1854, he offered an open public lecture defending the doctrine of papal infallibility, an event that was well-attended and reported in local press.[9] Working with the Daughters of the Cross, he helped establish the first Catholic school in the region, St. Hyacinth's Academy, in 1866.[10]
When yellow fever broke out in Shreveport in the late summer of 1873, Father Gergaud responded to a telegraph plea for help that arrived from Father Jean Marie Biler, the last priest alive in that city caring for victims.[11] Gergaud boarded a stagecoach for Shreveport, while the citizens of Monroe gathered around him and begged him not to leave. Eyewitnesses record that Father Gergaud turned to his assistant, Father Joseph Quelard, and said, "Write to the bishop and tell him I go to my death. It is my duty and I must go." [12]
Father Gergaud contracted yellow fever in Shreveport while caring for the sick and died on 1 October 1873. In his final moments, Father Francois Le Vezouet from Natchitoches was able to provide him with the final sacraments.[13] Originally buried in a Catholic family plot in City Cemetery (today Oakland Cemetery) in Shreveport, Father Gergaud's remains were afterwards exhumed and moved to St. Matthew's Cemetery in Monroe. In a community conflict that the media documented in length, the Catholics of Shreveport and Monroe passed competing resolutions as to which city would retain his earthly remains. Citizens of Monroe came to Shreveport's City Cemetery and exhumed his body in February 1874.[14] He is the only one of the five Shreveport Martyrs to not be buried at St. Joseph's Cemetery.
His biographical narrative appears in the book, Shreveport Martyrs of 1873: The Surest Path to Heaven, published by The History Press in 2021 and Shreveport Martyr Father Louis Gergaud: In His Own Words, The History Press in 2022, both co-authored by Father Peter B. Mangum, W. Ryan Smith, and Dr. Cheryl White. Father Gergaud also features in the 2021 documentary feature film, The Five Priests.
Website: https://www.shreveportmartyrs.org
- ^ Diocese of Shreveport.
- ^ Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Rome.
- ^ Vital Records and Necrology, Diocese of Nantes, France.
- ^ Records of the Grand Seminary of Nantes.
- ^ Report of Missions, Society for the Propagation of the Faith, December 1854.
- ^ Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
- ^ Archives of the Diocese of Nantes.
- ^ Dairy of Father Louis Gergaud, Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
- ^ Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
- ^ Daughters of the Cross Collection, Noel Archives and Special Collections, Louisiana State University at Shreveport.
- ^ Daughters of the Cross Collection, Noel Archives and Special Collections, Louisiana State University at Shreveport.
- ^ Correspondence of Bishop Auguste Martin, Diocese of Natchitoches Collection, Archives of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.
- ^ Daughters of the Cross Collection.
- ^ Ouachita Telegraph and Shreveport Times, December - February 1874.