Jean-Joseph Lataste

Jean-Joseph Lataste, born Alcide-Vital Lataste on 5 September 1832 in Cadillac-sur-Garonne in the Gironde in southwestern France, was a French Catholic priest of the Order of Preachers and founder of the Dominican Sisters of Bethany. He came from a Catholic family of the provincial middle class and received the education usual for that milieu. As a young man he worked for a time in the civil tax administration, the career associated with his father, and lived a largely secular life. A religious conversion in his twenties led him to seek admission to the Dominican Order, which Henri-Dominique Lacordaire had recently restored in France. He entered the novitiate at Flavigny-sur-Ozerain in 1857, received the religious name Jean-Joseph, made profession, completed his studies, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1863.

Assigned to preaching, he gave parish missions and retreats. In 1864 he preached a retreat to women detainees in the prison at Cadillac, his native town. That retreat became the turning point of his short life. He was deeply impressed by the faith and repentance of prisoners whom contemporary society treated as permanently stained, and he concluded that the Gospel required the Church to receive converted offenders as full members of the Christian community, without a lifelong mark of infamy. From that conviction he developed the then-controversial project of a congregation of Dominican sisters in which women coming out of prison would be admitted on an equal footing with sisters of ordinary background, sharing one novitiate, one habit, and one community life. Opponents feared scandal and the mixing of reputations; Lataste argued from the equality of souls before God and from the example of mercy in the Gospels.

In 1866 he succeeded in founding the community that took the name of Bethany, after the Gospel household of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, a place of friendship with Christ and of welcome for those whom others might exclude. The Dominican Sisters of Bethany were to be a contemplative family whose very composition would preach rehabilitation and hope. Lataste guided the first sisters, sought ecclesiastical approval, and wrote letters and short texts that present conversion as a real change of life rather than a mere sentiment. He is often called the Apostle of Prisons, a title that reflects this pastoral focus rather than a long institutional career, for his health was already failing.

Lataste died on 10 March 1869 at the age of thirty-six, only a few years after the foundation. The congregation endured and remained a Dominican family dedicated to prayer and to solidarity with people leaving prison and with others on the margins. A cause for his beatification was later introduced. Pope Benedict XVI authorized the beatification, which was celebrated on 3 June 2012 in Besançon. He is venerated as Blessed Jean-Joseph Lataste and has not been canonized. His liturgical commemoration is kept on 10 March, the anniversary of his death.