John Berthier

John Berthier, known in French as Jean Berthier, was a Roman Catholic priest and religious founder active in France and the Netherlands in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was born on 24 February 1840 in Châtonnay, a rural commune in the department of Isère in the historic Dauphiné region of southeastern France. In young adulthood he entered the Congregation of the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, a community of priests and brothers established after the reported apparition of the Virgin Mary to two children at La Salette in 1846. After formation and studies he was ordained a priest and took up the missionary and preaching work characteristic of that congregation.

The Missionaries of La Salette were dedicated to the message of conversion associated with the apparition and commonly conducted parish missions. In the course of this apostolate Berthier encountered numerous men who believed themselves called to the priesthood but who could not be admitted to diocesan or religious seminaries because of their age or insufficient prior education. The ordinary formation system of the time was designed for adolescents and young men with a classical schooling. Berthier came to see the exclusion of older or less prepared candidates as a loss both for those men and for a Church that needed priests.

With the consent of his superiors and of ecclesiastical authority, Berthier founded in 1895 a new religious congregation, the Missionaries of the Holy Family (Congregatio Missionariorum a Sacra Familia), with its first house at Grave in the Netherlands. The congregation took the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as its patron and model. Its principal aims were the recruitment and formation of candidates for the priesthood and religious life, with special attention to late vocations, and missionary and pastoral service. Grave, in the province of North Brabant, became the motherhouse and a center of formation.

Berthier directed the young institute in its first years, organizing studies, community life, and the promotion of vocations. He died in Grave on 16 October 1908. The congregation survived him, obtained further canonical approvals, and in subsequent decades established houses in Europe and beyond. Berthier has not been formally beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church, and he has no universal feast day or official list of patronages. He is commemorated within the Missionaries of the Holy Family as their founder and as a priest who sought to open a path to ordained ministry for men who would otherwise have been turned away.