Pierre Lambert de la Motte

Pierre Lambert de la Motte was born on 16 January 1624 at La Boissière in Normandy, in the kingdom of France. He was trained in the law and practiced as an advocate before the parlement of Rouen. In the 1650s he underwent a religious conversion, abandoned the bar, and was ordained a priest. In Paris he joined a circle of clergy and lay supporters, among them François Pallu, who had been stirred by the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes’s accounts of the church in Vietnam and who wished to send missionaries to East Asia under the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith rather than under the Portuguese padroado. That project became the origin of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, the Paris Foreign Missions Society, of which Lambert was a founding member.

In 1658 Pope Alexander VII appointed him vicar apostolic of Cochinchina and titular bishop of Beirut. Pallu was named vicar apostolic of Tonkin and Ignace Cotolendi vicar apostolic of Nanjing; the three prelates formed the first episcopal leadership of the new French mission. Lambert was consecrated bishop in 1660 and left Europe the same year. Traveling by way of the Levant, Persia, and India, he reached the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya in 1662. Siam, then a major trading kingdom comparatively open to foreign residents and Christian worship, became his principal base and the logistical center for the vicariates of Cochinchina and Tonkin.

From Ayutthaya he made missionary journeys into Cochinchina and Tonkin. He sought to organize existing Catholic communities, to assert the jurisdiction of the Holy See’s vicars apostolic against padroado claims, and to create an indigenous clergy. He ordained the first Vietnamese priests associated with the Paris mission. In 1670, in the course of a synod in Cochinchina, he founded the Amantes de la Croix (Lovers of the Cross), a congregation of Vietnamese women living under simple vows and devoted to catechesis and works of mercy. That institute is among the earliest native female religious congregations in Asia and has continued in Vietnam and in the diaspora. He also promoted a general seminary at Ayutthaya for the training of Asian candidates for the priesthood, a central aim of the Paris Foreign Missions.

Lambert’s insistence on papal rather than Portuguese royal jurisdiction, and on an Asian rather than exclusively European clergy, involved him in prolonged disputes with padroado authorities and with some Jesuit missionaries. He spent his later years in Siam, directing Cochinchina and neighboring fields largely by correspondence, through the seminary and the structures he had established at Ayutthaya, and by negotiation with the Siamese court. He died at Ayutthaya on 15 June 1679. He has not been beatified or canonized. His historical importance is institutional: the Paris Foreign Missions Society, the beginnings of a Vietnamese diocesan clergy, and the Lovers of the Cross all rest in substantial part on foundations he laid in the second half of the seventeenth century.