Alain-Marie du Noday

Alain-Marie du Noday was a twentieth-century French Dominican missionary bishop who spent nearly his entire active ministry in the interior of Brazil. He was born on 3 November 1899 in Plouguenast, a commune in Brittany in northwestern France. He entered the Order of Preachers and was ordained a priest on 25 July 1925. His vocation unfolded within a well-established French Dominican missionary tradition that, from the late nineteenth century onward, regularly sent members of the order to Latin America.

In March 1936, while still in his mid-thirties, he was appointed Bishop of Porto Nacional, a vast and sparsely served diocese in what was then northern Goiás (later the state of Tocantins). He received episcopal consecration on 24 August 1936. The territory under his care was marked by great distances, limited infrastructure, and a mixed population of settlers, riverine communities, and indigenous peoples. His episcopate lasted forty years and coincided with major demographic and administrative changes in central Brazil.

Du Noday took part in the Second Vatican Council as a council father, attending its sessions between 1962 and 1965. In the years that followed he applied the Council’s liturgical and pastoral reforms in his diocese. In accordance with post-conciliar norms on episcopal retirement he resigned the government of Porto Nacional on 5 May 1976 and thereafter held the title of bishop emeritus, remaining in Brazil.

He died on 14 March 1985 in Porto Nacional at the age of eighty-five. He is a representative figure of the French missionary episcopate in twentieth-century Brazil, whose long tenure helped maintain Catholic structures in a remote interior see. He was not beatified or canonized and is not the object of a liturgical cult.