Father Jean Pierre
Father Jean Pierre (29 September 1831 - 16 September 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. In 2022, the Vatican's Dicastery for the Causes of Saints permitted Father Pierre and the other four Shreveport Martyrs to proceed for consideration as a single Cause.
Born in Lanloup, France to Guillame and Claudine Pierre, little is known of his childhood until he entered the Petit Seminaire de Tréguier on 3 August 1845 just weeks before his fourteenth birthday. He joined a student association known as The Congregation of the Most Holy Virgin, a community dedicated to the cultivation of deeper personal piety, with an added emphasis on assisting each other with scholastic excellence. This association required a formal written pledge which Jean Pierre signed, which reads, “after satisfying a time of approval, Jean Pierre of Lanloup is received into the Congregation of the Most Holy Virgin established in the ecclesiastical school.” [1]
Institutional progress reports show that Jean Pierre was an exemplary student who excelled academically in every subject of his minor seminary studies. On 1 October 1852, Jean Pierre entered the Grand Seminaire de Saint-Brieuc. While from this point forward there is no surviving record of his progress in specific courses of study, or further detail on his academic capacity and piety, there is a signed document from the bishop of Saint-Brieuc, Jacques-Jean-Pierre Le Mée, which acknowledged Pierre’s placement as second in his graduating class. Bishop Augustus Marie Martin recruited him to come to the newly erected Diocese of Natchitoches in Louisiana and Pierre departed the port of Le Havre on 8 October 1854.[2]
Ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Natchitoches on 22 September 1855, Father Pierre's first assignment was the construction of a church and rectory at Bayou Pierre, Louisiana. He completed this by mid-1856, when Bishop Martin assigned him to the task of building a permanent church for Shreveport.[3] Father Pierre became the first pastor of Holy Trinity Catholic Church (Shreveport, Louisiana) and was serving there when the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1873 struck the city.[4]