| First Name | Henry |
| Name | JOURDAIN |
| Date of Birth | 04/05/1928 |
| Place of Birth | Saint-Quentin City, France |
| Diocese | Soissons |
| Priestly Ordination | 01/06/1952 |
| Diocese of Incardination | Beauvais |
| Departure on Mission | 13/07/1953 |
| Mission Place | Mualpi, Khiangkan, Singpial |
| Date of Death | 22/03/2017 |
| Place of Death and Burial | Montbeton City, France |
| Mission Country | Burma, 1928- 1966 (Mandalay) |
| Biography | Henri Jourdain was born on May 4, 1928, in Saint-Quentin (Aisne). Ordained a priest on June 1, 1952, he left on July 13, 1953, for the mission in Mandalay (Burma). He began studying Burmese in Caung U, Amarapura, and Chantaywa. In 1955, he was assigned to the mission in Mualpi. He oversaw the construction of 18 km of road between Kanmagy and Singpial. Expelled from Burma in 1966, he was assigned to the parish of M’lon, in the diocese of Dalat (Vietnam), where he remained until 1974. He then went to Indonesia. In 1977, he was sent to the diocese of Pangkalpinang. After studying Indonesian in Bandung, he was appointed vicar and then parish priest of Tanjungpinang, with responsibility for 1,350 islands in the Riau Archipelago. He returned to France in September 2009 for medical reasons and retired to Montbeton, where he died on March 22, 2017. He is buried in the MEP cemetery in the town. |
Obituary
Our colleague Henri Jourdain was born on May 4, 1928, in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He was the fifth of seven children. His father was an engineer with the SNCF (French National Railway Company); it was probably from him that Henri inherited his passion for mechanics. This would later lead him, between 1974 and 1975, to complete a six-month internship at the Citroën automotive technician training center, and then at Poclain, a company specializing in construction equipment and cranes. Serving as a missionary in three successive countries—Burma, Vietnam, and then Indonesia—Henri effectively applied his technical skills to the mission.
Coming from a well-to-do family, Henri always lived a very simple life, with only the bare essentials: two or three shirts at most, a few pairs of underwear, and two pairs of trousers. And while he was wearing what he had on, the rest was drying. With a generous heart, all his money went to the charities he had established here and there.
Did young Henri want to go on a mission to cold lands? At each of our annual retreats, Henri reminded us that, in his youth, he had wanted to sleep with his bedroom window open during the winter, in order to toughen himself up… The result was that he caught pneumonia.
Henri attended the minor seminary of Moncel in Pont-Sainte-Maxence[1] in the Oise region, where he was highly regarded by both his fellow students and his teachers. Entering the seminary of the Foreign Missions Society on September 30, 1946, Henri was ordained a priest on June 1, 1952, and incardinated into the diocese of Beauvais. He was ordained a priest on June 1, 1952, at the seminary on Rue du Bac. A few days later, he received his assignment: Mandalay in Burma. Before embarking on July 13, 1953, he spent eight months in London to improve his English.
Mission to Burma
During his first two years in Burma, Henri studied Burmese in various parishes around the city of Mandalay, before going, in October 1955, to the Chin people in the Arakan Mountains. He succeeded Father Louis Garrot, who had arrived in this region two years earlier. The mountain people who constituted his field of ministry lived in miserable conditions: malnutrition, lack of hygiene, alcoholism… The villages had become isolated, forcing the inhabitants into consanguineous marriages. Travel was then only possible on foot or horseback. Henri opened schools, organized the distribution of medicine, and, with the help of local people, built eighteen kilometers of road to connect these isolated villages to the rest of the population. Evangelization relied primarily on the work of catechists, irreplaceable assistants who left their families for ten days a month to accompany the missionary. Father Garrot “had already taken the training of these catechists to a very high level”; Henri continued in this vein, aiming to help the population renounce alcohol and superstitions. One of his vicars even became the Bishop of Mandalay. In a letter from July 1962, Henri wrote: “The seed is sprouting here and there, without apparent order […]. Evangelization resembles those strange fires which, at night during the dry season, suddenly ignite the slopes of our mountains [of Arakan] and leap from one hillside to another.” From his time in Burma, Henri retained the affectionate nickname “Teddy Bear,” because he supposedly finished off a bear, which was thought to be dead but wasn’t quite, while they were both being transported in the back of a hunter’s pickup truck.
Mission to Vietnam
Expelled from Burma in August 1966, Henri was then assigned to Vietnam. From March 1968 to May 1974, he worked in the parish of M’lon, located in the diocese of Dalat. He joined Father François Darricau, who had founded a center for the evangelization of the mountain people. An ingenious handyman, Henri had built a water system at the rectory: he would remember all his life the shower that nearly knocked him unconscious due to the force of the water, so significant was the drop in elevation in the pipes he had installed. Returning to France for vacation in the summer of 1974, Henri took the opportunity to complete his mechanics internship at Citroën, with the idea of training Vietnamese people upon his return. But political events forced him to change countries for the third time.
Mission to Indonesia
Henri arrived in Indonesia on December 16, 1977. He then went to Tanjung Pinang, the main island of the Riau archipelago located southeast of Singapore.[1] Apart from a three-month stay in Bandung, on the island of Java, to take an intensive Indonesian course with Yves Ramousse, Henri remained attached to his mission diocese of Pangkal Pinang. His territory of ministry was as large as West Germany: some 250,000 km². More than a thousand islands were scattered across this vast territory, of which barely 500 were inhabited. It sometimes took Henri 50 hours by boat to reach the most remote of his several thousand parishioners, who were mainly transmigrant “Floresians” and Indonesian Chinese. Here again, the work of the catechists was essential. Henri would bear the scars of those hours spent under the scorching sun and the glare of the sea: he would have to undergo several operations for skin cancer. After serving as a parish priest several times, Henri felt relieved, at 65, to hand over the reins to an Indonesian priest, not only because of the workload but especially because he wanted the local priests to take over the mission.
Upon his arrival in Tanjung Pinang, Henri opened a home to allow the most disadvantaged Catholic children and young people from the surrounding islands to study peacefully without having to pay exorbitant housing costs. There, they received a solid education in all areas, including Christian faith. Volunteers have served at this home since 1992. Through his rigorous lifestyle and the example he set, Henri inspired numerous priestly and missionary vocations among these volunteers, as well as in all the places where he worked.
Back to France
At the end of September 2009, at the age of 81, Henri, not wanting to be a burden on the parish and the diocese, decided to return permanently to France. He had a feeling that as long as he remained there, Indonesian priests would not freely take over.
Henri, you may have been as straight as an arrow, sometimes rigid in your pronouncements, especially regarding Muslims, and possessed a very traditional faith that didn’t always understand the questions of the volunteers who came to you with their own inner searches, but there wasn’t a trace of malice in you: you were always a generous man, with a heart of gold, always ready to help. Certainly, you didn’t hesitate to raise your voice from time to time when something displeased you… but you always apologized immediately afterward. I will never forget how, when you preached about God’s love, your voice would begin to tremble and tears would start to stream down your cheeks.
Henri passed away on March 22, 2017, in Montbeton, at the age of 89. For several months he had known his days were numbered. He told all his loved ones as much. He saw his strength diminishing day by day. He must have been suffering greatly, but he faced this ordeal with faith.
Note: All data are collected from https://irfa.paris/missionnaire/3954-jourdain-henri/
