«Ces femmes qui étaient mes soeurs…»: Vie du père Lataste, apôtre des prisons (1832–1869) (review)

The fascinating story of the founding of the first contemplative religious community to welcome formerly incarcerated women serves as the backdrop for this engaging biography of the founder, Father Jean-Joseph Lataste, O.P. (1832–69). The biography is the work of the Dominican theologian Jean-Marie Gueullette, vice-postulator of the cause for beatification of Lataste. Drawing from more than 400 handwritten sermons and an abundant correspondence as source material, Gueullette’s work provides important insights into the spirituality and faith of this apostle to the incarcerated and founder of the Dominican Sisters of Bethany.

It is interesting to note that Lataste’s brief life coincided with an important period in the history of the Dominican Order: the refounding of the province of France in 1843 by Henri Lacordaire after its demise during the French Revolution. Lataste first met the famed Dominican preacher in 1842 when Lacordaire visited the minor seminary he was attending in Bordeaux. After a brief career as a civil servant, Lataste entered the order in 1857 and became a devoted disciple of Lacordaire, particularly in the debates of the period concerning reform and observance. However, it is Lataste as founder in his own right that is the primary focus of the biography.

In 1864, the recently ordained priest was asked to preach a four-day retreat to the women incarcerated in the penitentiary at Cadillac, Lataste’s birthplace. Despite the prejudices of his time with regard to prisoners, he made a deliberate decision to address them in his opening sermon as “my dear sisters, my sisters in Adam, my sisters in Jesus Christ.” Gueullette sees here in this bold address both a summary of Lataste’s priestly ministry, one profoundly marked by faith in the power of God’s grace and mercy to heal and transform, as well as the seed of the project yet to unfold of conceiving a religious community for rehabilitated women. This initial retreat ended with the preacher inviting the women to embrace voluntarily through an act of love the forced labor and imposed silence of life in prison, thus imitating the life of vowed religious women. The result was numerous conversions.

Invited to preach a second retreat at Cadillac the following year, Lataste saw that the seeds of conversion from the previous year had taken root and borne fruit. This confirmed an intuition already in his mind that these former criminals, transformed by grace, should have the possibility of living out their conversion in the fullest possible way as contemplative religious upon release from prison. Up to this point, no such religious community existed in the Church. Lataste fully realized that only a small number of former prisoners might ever feel called to the religious life. Nevertheless, the point of his novel community would be to manifest within the Church and society at large, that despite their shameful past, rehabilitated women were worthy by God’s grace of the most elevated calling, that of the contemplative life.

Despite numerous obstacles and the derision of many, the project became a reality with the establishment of the first community of the Dominican Sisters of Bethany at Frasnes-le-Château in 1866. From the beginning, Bethany was conceived to be a community that would welcome women from normal circumstances as well as former prisoners. Gueullette sees here the originality of Lataste’s vision. This was to be a community where discretion would be maintained concerning one’s background so that the external observer would not be able to distinguish between the sisters. Thus would Bethany give witness to the possibility of complete rehabilitation in grace for those with an ignoble past.

Gueullette’s excellent biography concludes with a chapter on the spirituality of Lataste, including his appropriation of themes from the...