Pierre Biard (missionary)
French missionary
Pierre Biard (1567 – 17 November 1622) was a Jesuit missionary who was given orders by Father Pierre Coton, Jesuit provincial in Paris, to take charge of a mission at Port-Royal in Acadia, (present-day Nova Scotia, Canada) along with Father Énemond Massé.
Biography
Pierre Biard was born in Grenoble, France in 1567. In 1583 he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Tournon. He taught at Billom, studied philosophy and theology at Avignon, and was ordained a priest in 1599. He also taught theology at Tournon, and Hebrew at the Collège in Lyon, where he held the chair in scholastic theology.
In 1608, the provincial of the Jesuits of Paris, Father Pierre Coton SJ called him away from his professorship with orders to serve the mission of Port-Royal in Acadia (Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia).
Port Royal
The mission had been founded by Jean de Biencourt, known as Poutrincourt, a devout Catholic, in 1606, abandoned for financial reasons in 1607, then restored by Poutrincourt in 1610 who was appointed Lieutenant Governor by Sieur de Monts, now more interested in Quebec, founded by Champlain in 1608.
L'abbe Jesse Fleche had accompanied Poutincourt, and by the end of the year he had baptized 140 Mi'kmaq. The Mi'kmaq had known the French for over 100 years; those living near Port-Royal had known them intimately since 1606. It was common pastoral practice in France at the time to baptize without a complete instruction with the assumption that the Christian community would lead the neophytes to a fuller faith.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pierre Biard (missionary)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.