In the July heat, a bridge of hearts stretched across France, from the streets of Lille and the fields around Chemy to the churches and steep hills of Lyon. They came from across west and north Africa, from the Rift Valley, from the Mediterranean coast, from Ireland and England: OLA Sisters, SMA priests, lay missionaries, associates and friends, close to 120 pilgrims bringing their mix of languages, histories and ways of experiencing mission.
They came to honour three anniversaries converging within one shared story: 150 years since the foundation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles, 170 years since the foundation of the Society of African Missions, and 200 years since the birth of Fr Augustine Planque, the first Superior General of the SMA and the founder of the OLA congregation. The man whose willingness to be present to God’s call birthed this global family.
Yet the pilgrimage was more than a counting of years. It drew them back towards the places where a life had begun long before anyone knew what would come from it: a parish church, a classroom, a village road, a baptismal font. These places had reached them long before they ever set foot in them. They knew them through formation, community stories, archive letters and the institutions across Africa that still bear the names of Planque and de Brésillac. Now they would walk the streets themselves.
They left Lyon early for the long journey north, praying Lauds together as the bus moved through the morning. The hours filled with singing, laughter and conversations between people meeting for the first time, or seeing one another again after years apart, the time on the road erasing any formalities between them.
The pilgrimage began in Lille, where the air of the Church of St Catherine seemed to hold the echoes of a young Augustine Planque’s prayers. He had lived here with his aunt as a boy, before he had any name for what was stirring in him, before Bishop de Brésillac’s appeal in L’Univers, before the letters that drew him to Lyon, before the African missions and the responsibility that would consume almost fifty years of his life.
During the Eucharist, Fr Augustin Placide Houessinon, SMA Provincial of Lyon, returned to an invitation that followed the pilgrims through the days ahead: to remain “contemplative in action”. It was a return to what they had professed, spoken into this gathering of missionaries, where lives are so often measured by what must be done next: the school day beginning, the patient waiting, the parish gathering, the journey to another community, the need arising before there is time to prepare for it. His reminder was simple and exacting. Action must continue to draw its life from prayer.
The following day, the pilgrims entered Notre-Dame de la Treille Cathedral, near the place where Fr Planque once served as a teacher. For the OLA Sisters who continue to serve in schools, Fr Planque’s years as a teacher suddenly belonged to the present, this place shortening the distance between founder and daughter. He was no longer only the man in the portrait or the name in the congregation’s history. He had stood before students. He had faced the daily work of forming minds and lives. The Sisters who teach today recognised something of their own vocation in his. Sr Faustina Annan, who teaches in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo region, spoke of feeling called to give herself more fully to the children entrusted to her. Sr Victoria Ogbu of Nigeria described teaching as the giving of what one has received, knowledge passing through one life into another.
Sr Odile Hermann was also among them, celebrating sixty years of religious life after serving in Chad, Côte d’Ivoire and France. She had visited La Treille before without knowing the depth of Fr Planque’s connection with the diocese. At eighty, surrounded by younger Sisters and priests, she spoke of the pilgrimage as a new beginning. There was no sense of a life closing behind her. She stood in a place infused by the founder’s youth and felt her own life opening again.
The heart of the journey beat strongest in the small village of Chemy. On 25 July, two hundred years to the day since Fr Planque’s birth, the pilgrims entered the village where he had first been known simply as a child of the Planque family. The streets were narrow, the houses close to the land, the scale of the place startling beside the reach of the missionary family that gathered there.
In Saint-Martin Church, the site of his baptism, the pilgrims witnessed the bridge between Europe and Africa become visible in the faces of local farmers and global missionaries gathered as one. The singing rose through a church built for a village congregation and filled it with voices that had travelled far beyond Chemy. A local farmer, Hervé Wartelle, spoke with wonder of someone who had lived there two centuries earlier still drawing the world back to the village.
Sister Mary T. Barron, OLA Congregational Leader, reflected on Fr Planque’s names: Augustine, received from his mother, and Joseph, present on both sides of his family. Together, she said, they spoke of a missionary spirit joined to the heart of a faithful guardian, the outward call and the labour of protecting what had been entrusted to him.
The shared patrimony with the SMA, born from the providential encounter between the visionary Bishop de Brésillac and the tenacious Fr Planque, was celebrated here. Sr Mary recalled the decisive exchange between the two. Bishop de Brésillac asked the young priest to give himself entirely to the work and Fr Planque answered with one word: “Present”. Bishop de Brésillac, before his early death in Freetown, entrusted the future of the SMA to Fr Planque’s will, a trust that has been vindicated by 150 years of history.
For Sr Pauline Bitanga, director of the Père Augustin Planque College in Togo, the pilgrimage was inseparable from the young people she serves. The college will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in September, and she had come to ask Fr Planque’s intercession for its future. Chantal Kaka from Benin, whose children attended the college bearing his name in Cotonou, felt she was standing in Chemy on their behalf and Sr Martha Davis of Ghana spoke of the founder coming closer to the present generation now that she had seen the village where his life began.
A meal had not been part of the original plan, yet tables appeared and people stayed. The village and the pilgrims ate together. Around those tables, the bridge between Europe and Africa was no longer an idea attached to Fr Planque’s history. It was there in the passing of plates, in conversations crossing languages, in people from places he had never seen sitting among the descendants of those who had known his family name.
From Chemy, the pilgrims travelled south towards Lyon, where the pilgrimage entered another part of OLA memory.
At Vénissieux, the Church of the Immaculate Conception stands beside the site of the former OLA novitiate. Inside is a chapel dedicated to the nineteen Martyrs of Algeria beatified in Oran in 2018. Among them are the OLA Sisters, Blessed Angèle-Marie Littlejohn and Blessed Bibiane Leclercq, killed together on 3 September 1994 as they prepared to attend Mass.
As they stood before their memory, the atmosphere grew heavy. These Sisters, who had chosen to remain as a “place of hope” during Algeria’s “black decade”, represent the ultimate expression of the missionary charism: a life given freely for the sake of the Gospel.
The pilgrims were drawn away from any heroic retelling that might make their decision feel remote from ordinary life. They had loved a people and a place over many years. When danger came, they remained within the life they had already given.
For Sr Marie-Claude Sohier, who had served in Algeria, the chapel brought the country back with force. She remembered the welcome of its people and the many Algerian civilians who had also been killed: teachers, intellectuals and around a hundred imams murdered for refusing to endorse violence against non-Muslims. At the beatification in Oran, she recalled, Muslims outnumbered Christians in the congregation. Her memory placed the two Sisters within the wider grief of Algeria. Their deaths belonged to a land where Muslim and Christian lives had been taken by the same violence, and where friendship had survived what fear tried to destroy.
Sr Éloïse Murielle Ahou, currently serving in Algeria, struggled to find language for the experience of entering the chapel. Angèle-Marie and Bibiane had become for her signs of a mission that gives everything. She would return to Algeria with news of this small space in Vénissieux where part of the country’s history is kept.
Fr Antonio Porcellato, former SMA Superior General, linked the Sisters’ deaths with those of the early missionaries who died on the West African coast. OLA and SMA history contains many lives given in places far from home, some over decades of service and others cut short soon after arrival. The question left with those present was how that gift continues now, through the choices made in lives that may never be recorded in any history.
The final full day brought the pilgrims to Notre-Dame Saint-Louis de la Guillotière in Lyon, the church where Fr Planque’s funeral was held in 1907 and where an OLA community lives today.
The Sisters and priests gathered in La Guillotière came from communities and ministries that neither founder could have imagined, yet the missionary family remained connected to the promise made between them. Here, they reflected on the qualities that sustained their common work through decades of trial: tenacity, resilience, and an absolute trust in God.
Bishop Patrick Le Gal spoke of God’s power at work through humility and self-emptying. Those words returned the founder to human scale. Fr Planque’s life was not built from certainty. He lived through disappointment, opposition, financial strain and the deaths of missionaries he had sent out. He continued because he believed the work had been entrusted to him.
The testimonies that followed brought that inheritance into the present. Sr Agnès Gyima of Ghana remembered the difficult beginnings of the OLA mission in Botswana, when the Sisters were viewed with suspicion and had to allow time for people to understand why they had come. Sr Juvénile Yévidé of Benin, now serving in Niger, needed only three words to say what the whole week had been circling: ‘Mission is received’.
It is received through those who came before, through the people who offer welcome, through communities that test and change understanding, and through responsibilities a person might not necessarily have chosen. Fr Planque received the unfinished work of Bishop de Brésillac. The first OLA Sisters received a call that drew them towards Africa. Each generation receives the mission again and must discover how to live it faithfully in its own time.
On the final morning the pilgrims climbed towards Fourvière, above the city where the SMA had been consecrated on 8 December 1856. The hill held the beginning of their shared story, though that beginning had been far from secure. Melchior Marion de Brésillac and Augustine Planque had climbed it together with five companions. Within months only three of the seven remained.
That fragile beginning lay beneath the final day of the pilgrimage. Jesus’ question to the disciples, “Do you also want to leave?”, followed the missionary family back through its own history: through Bishop de Brésillac’s death in Freetown, through the years when Fr Planque struggled to keep the young Society alive, through the founding of the OLA Sisters, and through every later moment when remaining demanded courage, self-denial, patience and perseverance within the uncertainty of an unseen future.
At Fourvière, the pilgrimage turned towards that future. Archbishop Michel Cartateguy offered an image that gathered the whole pilgrimage into itself: two fig saplings, one grown where Bishop de Brésillac had been born, one where Fr Planque had grown up, brought together and set down in the same ground, in Lyon, in the place where the two men first met. That same intermingling of origins, histories and callings ran through the missionary family gathered on the hill, its branches extending far beyond France.
Sr Clémentine Remadji Narangar, an OLA Sister from Chad shared her gratitude at finally seeing the places where it had all begun. The SMA is not yet established in Chad, where the OLA Sisters are already present, but she spoke openly of her hope that their brothers would soon join them. Two sites are being prepared, and the Sisters’ presence may open the road towards a shared mission there.
Her hope drew the founding story into the present. The relationship between OLA and SMA was no longer contained in archives, anniversaries or the places the pilgrims had visited. It was already reaching towards another country, another community and work still waiting to begin. The same trust that once passed from Bishop de Brésillac to Fr Planque could be recognised in the Sisters preparing ground their SMA brothers might one day enter.
Sr Françoise Fri Abena spoke of returning to the source in order to set out again. Fr Michael Adebote, SMA, looked towards a generation of “missionaries without borders”, proclaiming the Gospel in Africa, from Africa and with Africa. Around them were Sisters and priests whose own lives already traced that movement, African women and men serving across Europe and the Americas, and missionaries crossing the continent in directions the founders could never have foreseen.
The pilgrimage had taken them from the church of Fr Planque’s baptism to the church of his funeral, through the classroom where he taught and the chapel where the memory of Angèle-Marie and Bibiane is held. At Fourvière, those memories gathered into a sending.
They came down from the hill and travelled to Chaponost for one final meal together. Soon the buses would leave, suitcases would be repacked, and the pilgrims would scatter again to their countries and communities. The triple jubilee would continue until December, but the road through France had reached its end.
From the heights of Lyon, the distance between Chemy and Africa no longer felt measured in kilometres. Something had altered through the walking, the prayer, the meals and the stories told in the places where they had begun. Between them lay lives given to sustaining a mission they would never see in full.
Mission lived in the movement across generations: received from one another, extended beyond what any one person could accomplish, and reaching now towards places where the next part of the story has yet to be lived.
They will take home both memories and a renewed sense of “the joy of togetherness”. What travels with them is a seed for the future, and a willingness to keep growing wherever they are planted.