Alain de Boismenu

Alain-Marie Guynot de Boismenu was a French Roman Catholic missionary bishop of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart who spent nearly his entire priestly life in Papua, in what is now Papua New Guinea. He was born on 27 December 1870 in Saint-Malo, in Brittany, France. Drawn to religious life and the foreign missions, he entered the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, a French congregation devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He made his religious profession in the early 1890s and was ordained a priest in the mid-1890s. He volunteered for Oceania and was sent to the vicariate in British New Guinea, arriving at the mission centre on Yule Island, off the Papuan coast, in the late 1890s. That mission had been pioneered by earlier Sacred Heart missionaries, among them Louis-André Navarre.

His superiors and Rome soon marked him for leadership. He was appointed coadjutor vicar apostolic and consecrated a bishop in 1900, while still a young man. In 1908 he succeeded Navarre as Vicar Apostolic of Papua, an office he held until 1945. Over those decades he travelled widely through difficult country, founding and consolidating mission stations, promoting schools and catechesis, and working for a local church rather than a merely European outpost. He encouraged indigenous vocations. In the later 1910s he was instrumental in founding the Handmaids of Our Lord, a congregation of Papuan women religious. The Frenchwoman Marie-Thérèse Noblet, whose spiritual life he had directed in France after a period of severe trial, later came to Papua and played a leading role in forming that community, especially at Kubuna in Mekeo country, which became a spiritual centre of the vicariate. He also collaborated with European missionary sisters, including the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart.

Boismenu’s episcopate was shaped by Sacred Heart spirituality, personal austerity, and a reputation for prolonged prayer. He insisted that the Gospel take root among Papuan peoples and that they should have their own religious and, in time, clerical leadership. The Second World War brought Japanese military operations, internment, disruption, and loss to the missions of New Guinea; he remained identified with his flock through those years. In 1945 he resigned the vicariate.

He spent his last years at Kubuna among the Handmaids of Our Lord. He died there on 5 November 1953 and was buried at the mission. Already in his lifetime many regarded him as a holy bishop. A cause for beatification was later introduced, and the Catholic Church has recognized his heroic virtues, so that he is known as Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonized, was never Bishop of Rome nor patriarch of an Eastern see, and has no universal feast day or widely recorded official patronages.