Francis Libermann

Origins and early life

Francis Libermann was born Jacob Libermann in Saverne, in Alsace, on 12 April 1802, the fifth son of Lazarus Libermann, the rabbi of the town, and was raised in strict Orthodox Judaism and sent to the yeshiva of Metz to become a rabbi himself.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly what followed: in Paris, after a crisis of faith that his study of the Talmud had opened and the conversions of his elder brothers had deepened, he was baptized a Catholic on Christmas Eve 1826 and took the name Francis, to his father's lasting grief — the case, within the rules of this directory, of a man born and raised a Jew who left Judaism, and whom Jewish law and the persecutors alike would have gone on counting as a Jew.

Epilepsy kept him from ordination for a decade; he was finally ordained in 1841 and in the same year founded the Society of the Holy Heart of Mary, devoted to the evangelization of the Black peoples of Africa and the freed slaves of the colonies, which he merged in 1848 with the older Congregation of the Holy Ghost, the Spiritans, becoming their superior general and, in effect, their second founder. From Paris he trained and sent the missionaries who founded the Catholic Church in Senegal, Gabon, Guinea and much of West and Central Africa, and he gave them a rule that was new in its century: 'Be Black with the Blacks, in order to form them as they should be, not in the fashion of Europe but leaving them what is their own' — a call to respect the peoples they went to that missiology still cites. He died in Paris on 2 February 1852, and Pope Pius X declared him Venerable in 1910.