Long service: Bretaudeau will be returning to his parish in Vendée, France to re-evangelise the French people.
ONE of Malaysia’s longest serving
foreign priests, 83-year old Reverend Father Peter Bretaudeau will be
closing a chapter of his life to return to his homeland after 57 years.
“Having spent so many years in Malaysia, I regret very much having to
leave this beautiful country, but I know France needs me more now,” said
Bretaudeau.
When he first arrived in the then Malaya, one month
after independence in August 1957, there were only about 37,000
Catholics in the Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur. To-date, that figure has
grown to 300,000.
Conversely, Bretaudeau said French Catholics had become alarmingly complacent about their religion.
“In the parish that I am returning to in La Roche-sur-Yon,
Vendée, less than 10% of Catholics regularly attend Mass, so I will
spend the rest of my days trying to bring more French people back to the
church,” he added.
Born in 1931 as the third of five children in
the village of Le Poiré-sur-Vie in Vendée, Bretaudeau found his calling
to join the priesthood at the age of 25.
“At that time, there
were hardly any Catholics in Asia and I wanted to join the Paris Foreign
Missions Society or Societe des Missions Etrangeres de Paris (MEP) so I
could come here.
“The MEP decided to send me to Malaysia.
“When I first arrived, I could not speak a word of English so I learnt
the language here before going to India for two years to learn Tamil,”
said Bretaudeau, who has retained his French accent but incorporates
“lah” in his conversation.
One of his fondest memories is the 10
years he spent as the main parish priest in Seremban, Negri Sembilan in
the 1960s and 1970s.
“At the time, there were many Indians
working in the rubber estates around the area and their poverty and hard
working conditions struck me,” said Bretaudeau.
Wanting to
provide estate workers in the state with a better life, Bretaudeau met
with the National Union of Plantation Workers (NUPW) and discussed
forming an organisation to improve the education opportunities for
workers’ children.
“In the late 1960s, the fall in the price of
rubber badly affected them and the need for such a movement became more
urgent,” he said.
With the help of the NUPW, the Persatuan
Kemajuan Rakyat (PKR) was born, starting with eight members and
expanding to hundreds over the next two years.
“To address the
problem of unemployment among youths in the estates around Seremban, we
set up tailoring classes for girls and a vocational institute to train
boys in electronics,” said Bretaudeau, noting that the institute was the
first of its kind in the state.
Many students from this electronics institute went on to become teachers when NUPW started another institute.
His career as a Catholic missionary took him to 10 churches around the Klang Valley and Negri Sembilan.
“Malaysia has developed so much, I feel there is nothing more for me to
do here so I want to return to France while I am still in good health,”
said Bretaudeau, who will spend two weeks visiting his family,
including two sisters, before starting his pastoral work.
He
leaves the Holy Family Church, Kajang in the capable hands of Reverend
Father George Harrison, who was inspired to join the priesthood by
Bretaudeau.
