Pierre Louis Marie Galibert

Pierre Louis Marie Galibert was a French Catholic clergyman of the Latin rite who served as a bishop in North Africa during the colonial period. He was born on 15 January 1877 in Castres, in the department of Tarn in southern France. After ecclesiastical studies he was ordained a priest on 29 June 1901. He belonged to the secular (diocesan) clergy rather than a religious order and exercised pastoral ministry in France before his appointment to the episcopate.

On 13 March 1933 Pope Pius XI named him Bishop of Constantine in Algeria, a see sometimes associated historically with Hippo. He received episcopal consecration on 29 June 1933. The diocese covered an important region of French North Africa with both a European settler Catholic population and a longer Christian past dating to Roman times. Galibert’s fifteen years as residential bishop spanned the later Third Republic, the Second World War, and the immediate postwar years, a period of growing political tension in Algeria.

He resigned the Diocese of Constantine in February 1948 and was appointed titular bishop of Auzia, an ancient see in Roman Mauretania. Assignment of a titular see was the ordinary practice for bishops who had left a residential diocese. He spent the remainder of his life in retirement.

Galibert died on 31 December 1965 at the age of eighty-eight. No cause for beatification or canonization was introduced, and he is not venerated with a feast day or recognized patronages. Surviving notices of his career are largely confined to the dates of ordination, appointment, resignation and death, which is typical for many diocesan bishops of his generation who did not become widely known beyond their own sees. His life is representative of French Catholic prelates who administered the Church in North African territories under French rule in the first half of the twentieth century.