Jean Cassaigne

Jean Cassaigne was a French Roman Catholic missionary bishop of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris) whose life was spent almost entirely in Vietnam, first among the highland Koho people and later as Apostolic Vicar of Saigon. He was born on 18 January 1895 at Grenade-sur-l'Adour in the Landes department of southwestern France. After seminary studies he entered the Paris Foreign Missions Society and was ordained a priest on 19 December 1925. In 1926 he was sent to French Indochina and assigned to the isolated mission of Djiring, now Di Linh, on the Lang Biang plateau in the central highlands. There he learned the Koho language, evangelized among the ethnic minority population, and took up the care of people suffering from leprosy, which was then endemic in the region. The leprosarium he developed at Di Linh became the defining work of his missionary identity.

In February 1941 he was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Saigon and titular bishop of Agbia, and he was consecrated bishop in June of that year. He governed the southern vicariate through the Japanese occupation of Indochina, the collapse of French colonial authority, and the First Indochina War. As bishop he ordained clergy, administered a large and growing Vietnamese Catholic community, and kept Church institutions functioning under successive and often hostile political regimes. Despite the dignity of the Saigon see, he remained known for personal simplicity and for his continuing attachment to the highland poor and the sick.

After the 1954 Geneva Conference divided Vietnam, Cassaigne asked to be relieved of the vicariate so that he might return to the lepers of Di Linh. His resignation was accepted in September 1955. He spent the last eighteen years of his life at the Di Linh leprosarium, living among the patients he had first served as a young priest. He died at Di Linh on 31 October 1973 and was buried at the leprosarium. In the Vietnamese Church he is remembered as the bishop of the lepers and as a model of missionary self-effacement. He has not been beatified or canonized; local memory and popular devotion, rather than a completed Roman process, account for the hagiographical interest attached to his name.