250 Years Later, the MEP Mission in India Lives On: A Personal Witness

Puducherry, August 28, 2026: In 1776, two stories of freedom were being written at opposite ends of the world. On one shore of the Atlantic, thirteen colonies declared independence, and France would soon stand beside them—not to plant an empire, but to help a people claim a liberty they believed was theirs by Divine right. In the same year, on the Coromandel Coast, the Holy See entrusted the Carnatic Mission of Pondicherry to the priests of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris. Mgr Pierre Brigot received the charge. The Jesuits had been suppressed. A new chapter began.

That coincidence of dates is not a curiosity for historians alone. France did not come to America to build an empire of domination, and the MEP did not come to India to possess a people. They came to announce a freedom older and deeper than any constitution: the right given to every person, without distinction of race or rank—a right revealed in Jesus Christ, who came to free us from sin and to bless us with the freedom of the children of God.

REMEMBER, REJOICE, RENEW: The motto of the jubilee, and the shape of these days.

Two hundred and fifty years later, that same motto has been placed over this jubilee like a banner. I have been blessed to live those three words from the inside, on the personal invitation of His Excellency Archbishop Francis Kalist of Pondicherry and Cuddalore, and of the Right Reverend Father Vincent Sénéchal, Superior General of the Paris Foreign Missions. What follows is not a chronicle from the gallery. It is a letter of thanksgiving from a guest who was received as a brother.

Remember

To remember, in the Church, is never nostalgia. It is gratitude that still has a pulse.

We walked down memory lane as we shared breakfast in the Archbishop’s House, and we walked through the courtyards of Petit Seminaire Higher Secondary School on Mahatma Gandhi Road, where the inauguration opened this week of grace. We remembered in the blessing of the new MEP Block at Petit Seminaire CBSE School in Moolakulam, and in the meeting of Indian priests who completed their ecclesiastical studies under the sponsorship of MEP Paris. That last gathering moved me more than I can easily say. The Society’s oldest instinct—form a local clergy, then step back so that the Church may stand on her own feet—has borne fruit that now sits at the same table as the sons of those who first arrived. 

We remembered on the road to Cuddalore and among the ruins of the old College General seminary at Veerampattinam. There, in 1771, after the destruction of the General College in Siam, the Society planted a house of formation for the whole of Asia. The stones are quieter now. They still speak. A Church that forgets its seminaries forgets how it learned to speak the name of Jesus in another tongue.

We remembered with a sung Requiem in the cemetery of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, paying homage to the MEP missionaries buried there, and in the solemn Eucharist offered for all the MEP priests who have departed to eternal rest. Their graves are not a museum. They are a communion of saints written in Tamil soil. Later, the Memorial Adoration Chapel—built and donated by Mr Rheeman and Anita Raymond and their family in remembrance of the late Fr J. Paul—was blessed as a living lamp before the Blessed Sacrament, in commemoration of these 250 years. Memory became prayer. Prayer became a presence.

The mission that began as a sui iuris mission in 1776 became a Vicariate in 1836 and an Archdiocese in 1886; in 1953 it received the name Pondicherry and Cuddalore, a title that holds both the old French city and the Tamil hinterland in one embrace. Behind every date there are names: Brigot, Champenois, Bonnand, Laouënan, Gandy, Morel, Colas—and then the first Indian archbishops, who received a Church already rooted and made it still more Indian, still more Catholic. 

Rejoice

If remembrance is the root, joy is the flowering.

I have rarely seen a local Church rejoice with such diligence and such enthousiasm. The youth of this archdiocese were not spectators. They prepared, they served, they sang, they processed. From the Archbishop’s House to Petit Seminaire on M.G. Road a solemn procession moved like a living rosary through the streets. There were Eucharistic celebrations morning and evening, a civil felicitation and a religious one, tea under the same roofs where missionaries once planned the next village visit, supper that tasted of family more than of protocol.

And then there was Cardinal Oswald Gracias. His presence among us for the whole duration of the triduum—with that inextinguishable smile and those words of wisdom that never seem to hurry—was more than an honour for Pondicherry. It was a sign that India as a whole can partake in the joy of this jubilee. From Bangalore to Sikkim, from Kerala to Arunachal Pradesh, the friendship that began here 250 years ago has become an unbreakable bond between the Catholic Church in India and our Society. 

Renew

Renewal is the most demanding of the three words. Memory can be recited. Joy can be sung. Renewal must be chosen.

The mission is not over. Our friendship is not over either.

That is why I offered relics of Saint Carlo Acutis to the Archbishop of Pondicherry, to be installed soon in this historical cathedral. He has such a great impact on my life, and is now inspiring a new generation of missionaries to wake up. Carlo is a saint of the twenty-first century: young, Eucharistic, unafraid of the new tools of his age, in love with a Lord who is not an idea but a Presence. To place his relics in the mother church of an archdiocese born in 1776 is to say, without speeches, that we do not wish to freeze holiness in the eighteenth century. We want to bring holiness together into this century. The same Gospel that crossed the seas in sailing ships must now cross the screens and the streets where our young people actually live.

Father Vincent Sénéchal has often recalled that the Society’s institutions do not mark the end of a story, but the beginning of a new chapter. I heard that conviction again this week—not as a slogan from Paris, but as a handshake in Puducherry. Three hundred and thirty one priests of our Society have given their life for the people of India since 1776. One hundred and thirty MEP priests still serve across Asia and the Indian Ocean to this day. Indian priests still study in the house on the rue du Bac. The current now runs both ways. 

Thanksgiving

I cannot close without saying what my heart has said all week.

I thank His Excellency Archbishop Francis Kalist, who opened his house and his diocese with the generosity of a father and the precision of a pastor. I thank all his clergy, the religious congregations whose convents and schools became our itinerary, and the faithful who filled churches as if a feast of the family had been announced. I thank especially the youth, so diligent in preparation and celebration that one understood, watching them, why the Church in India still has a future that sings.

I extend that gratitude to the whole Church in India. This jubilee is not a private anniversary of one coastal archdiocese. It celebrates a friendship that began 250 years ago and has stretched across the map of this country. Cardinal Oswald’s smile was, for me, the face of that wider communion.

To Archbishop Kalist, to Father Vincent, to every sister who continues to lead the emancipation of Indian girls in the schools founded by our forefathers, to every seminarian who held a candle and sang with more air than my lungs can contain, to every family that lined the procession route: thank you. You did not merely organise an event. You allowed me to remember that my vocation was born here back in 2010, in the streets of Calcutta where I saw the face of Christ in those that Mother Teresa called us to serve. 

I am on my way back to my mission in Cambodia as I write this little memento. The cathedral will remain. The graves will remain. The schools will open again on Monday. The Adoration Chapel will keep its lamp. And the relics of a young saint will soon have a place in the old church of the Immaculate Conception. We will remember what God has done. We can also rejoice in what He is doing among us now. We must definitely renew the one mission that has never belonged to France or to India alone—the mission of Jesus Christ, to proclaim the Good News to all nations that the world may have life and have it to the full. We look forward to this mission together.

By Father Will Conquer

Puducherry