Jacques Berthieu
1838-1896 19th century Feast day: June 8
The prayer of someone who sows without seeing anything come up.
Who was Jacques Berthieu?
The son of peasants from the Cantal, a Jesuit, he spent twenty-one years in Madagascar. For the last eighteen months he served eighteen stations alone across a very wide country, on horseback, with no fellow priest. He was killed in 1896 during the Menalamba rising, a revolt against the French protectorate from which the mission had not managed to keep its distance.
In their own words
All in all the Mission is making progress, though in many places the fruit is still only hoped for, and in others barely visible. But what does that matter to us, provided we are good sowers: God will make it grow in his own time.
And yet God gives me the grace to love still more these uncultivated fields of Madagascar, where all I can do is to fish, and painfully at that, with a line, for a few souls for our Lord.