Dishonoured in the past but long ago rehabilitated before God, they must now be rehabilitated before humanity.
— Blessed Jean-Joseph Lataste, Les RΓ©habilitΓ©es (Rehabilitated Women), 1866
The Man Who Walked Into Cadillac Prison
On September 15, 1864, a young Dominican priest arrived at the ChΓ’teau de Cadillac to preach a four-day retreat. He was thirty-two years old. He had been a priest for eighteen months. He had never spoken to a woman prisoner in his life.
He later told a friend: I entered with considerable embarrassment, persuaded that the undertaking would prove futile.
The chΓ’teau was a former ducal castle on the Garonne River, a structure that had once been among the most opulent in the Bordeaux region and was now a prison for nearly four hundred women serving sentences ranging from months to decades. Most were poor, uneducated, without family connections. Many had committed crimes born of desperation. They had been sentenced, confined, and effectively forgotten — invisible to the society that had confined them, marked in the minds of respectable people by a stigma they would carry for the rest of their lives.
Father Lataste walked in prepared for failure. What he encountered was something else. By the last night of the retreat, most of the women were attending Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Some stayed until midnight. Others came back before dawn and remained until morning. The demand for confession was so high that he could give only one sermon a day — the rest of his time was taken up in the confessional. At the end, in his notes, he quoted the words of Saint Catherine of Siena: I have seen the secrets of God; I have seen wonders.
He left Cadillac knowing that God had called him to do something for these women. It would take the rest of his short life — he had less than five years — to work out what that something was.
Cadillac, Bordeaux, 1832: The Freethinker's Youngest Son
Alcide-Vital Lataste was born on September 5, 1832, in the town of Cadillac itself — the same town that held the prison he would one day transform. He was the youngest of seven children. His father Vital was a vineyard owner and fabric merchant who described himself as a freethinker — anticlerical, indifferent to faith, representative of the bourgeois liberal culture of post-Revolutionary France that had made peace with the world and its opportunities and abandoned the Church. His mother was a practicing Christian.
Alcide was baptised the day after his birth and raised by his mother in the faith. As a child he was healed from a serious illness, an event he attributed to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin and that left a permanent mark on his devotion. His older sister Rosy, who entered religious life, was his godmother and a steady support for the faith his father did not share.
He studied at the minor seminary of Bordeaux, where he encountered Henri Lacordaire — the great Dominican who had re-established the Order of Preachers in France after the Revolution destroyed it, and whose preaching at Notre-Dame de Paris in the 1830s had converted and formed a generation of French Catholic intellectuals. Lacordaire was one of the defining figures of nineteenth-century French Catholicism: brilliant, eloquent, capable of speaking to an educated secular audience in terms it could hear, a man of personal holiness combined with intellectual force. For the young Alcide, seeing Lacordaire was a crystallising event.
But Alcide did not immediately enter religious life. He worked for several years as a tax controller in various southern French towns — Privas, Pau, NΓ©rac — and during this period became an active member of the Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul, the lay Catholic organisation founded by Blessed FrΓ©dΓ©ric Ozanam that brought middle-class Catholics into direct personal service of the poor. The experience shaped what would later become his vocation: the discovery that the gap between respectable society and those it had discarded was not as large as it appeared, and that bridging it was the Gospel's specific demand.
At twenty-five, following Lacordaire, he entered the Dominican novitiate at Flavigny on November 4, 1857. He took the name Jean-Joseph. His early years as a friar were marked by illness — he was physically delicate in a way that would define his life and shorten it. But at the priory of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, where the relics of Saint Mary Magdalene were kept, he had a spiritual experience that would shape everything that followed.
During the transfer of the relics of Saint Mary Magdalene, he kissed the relic and said to himself: It is thus true that the greatest sinners have in them what makes for the greatest saints; who knows if they will not one day become such. Mary Magdalene was not, for Lataste, primarily a theological symbol. She was a person — a woman who had lived a particular life, been encountered by Christ, been transformed, and then been received into the inner circle of those who mattered most to him. The tradition that identified Mary of Magdala with Mary of Bethany — the woman who sat at Christ's feet, whom Jesus preferred over the busy and virtuous Martha — meant that the greatest sinner in the Gospel had also chosen the better part. The conclusion Lataste drew from this was both personal and institutional: there was no category of person too far gone for the love of God, and the Church's task was to make this structurally real, not just theologically asserted.
He was ordained priest on February 8, 1863, in Marseille.
The Vision That Formed at Cadillac
The September 1864 retreat was not Lataste's first knowledge of women prisoners. He had heard about them during his years with the Saint Vincent de Paul conferences, had known in the abstract that they existed and suffered. But direct encounter is different from abstract knowledge, and Cadillac changed him permanently.
What changed him was not the statistics — four hundred women, various crimes, long sentences — but the people. He had walked in persuaded that he would find spiritual deadness or hostility or indifference. He found women praying. He found women who had maintained a life of faith through years of imprisonment. He found women who wanted to give themselves to God.
And he found himself thinking the question that would define the rest of his life: What will become of them?
When they left prison — those who left — they would carry a mark. Not a legal one necessarily, but a social one, which was in many ways more indelible. They would find no employment in respectable households. They would find no welcome in ordinary religious congregations, which feared the confusion of their reputation with those of former criminals. They would be released into a world that had already decided what they were, and the world's decision would pull them back toward the life that had imprisoned them in the first place. The statistics were brutal: recidivism was high, not because these women were beyond reformation, but because society provided no structural alternative to the path back to crime.
Lataste's response to this question was radical: found a religious congregation that would receive them. A contemplative congregation, modelled on the Dominican tertiary life, where former prisoners and women of irreproachable past would live together as religious sisters, with the same habit, the same rule, the same status — where it would be impossible from the outside to tell which woman had been in prison and which had not, because the congregation would make no distinction.
He called it the House of Bethany. At Bethany, Jesus had visited two sisters: Martha, of inviolable virtue, and Mary — whom Lataste, following Augustine and Gregory the Great, identified with Mary Magdalene. Jesus had loved to come and rest in their home. He had made no distinction between them — or rather, following Luke 10, he had preferred Mary. Mary, who had been a sinner, had chosen the better part. The House of Bethany would embody this: former prisoners and women of irreproachable virtue, praying together, with no distinction visible to anyone.
The Opposition and the Patience
The reaction to Lataste's proposal was swift and largely hostile.
The Dominican Third Order Regular communities, onto which he had hoped to graft the new congregation, were afraid. They ran schools for respectable girls. They feared that association with former prisoners would destroy their reputation and their schools. Parents would not send daughters to schools run by women who might be criminals. The obvious objection — they will harm the meditative atmosphere — was repeated in various forms by people who did not want to engage with what Lataste was actually saying.
The local archbishop was willing, but not ready to authorise the project financially. The Dominican Order itself was cautious. Even among supporters, the concern was whether enough women would actually want to join — whether former prisoners, once released, would choose the religious life over the attempt to rebuild normal lives.
Lataste waited. He published his booklet Les RΓ©habilitΓ©es (Rehabilitated Women) in 1866, sending copies to journalists and government officials, making the case in public language that society had an obligation to these women and that religion had a structural answer. He preached. He wrote. He returned to Cadillac in September 1865 for a second retreat and found the same women who had been at the first, still keeping what he had given them.
The phrase he kept returning to, in letters and conversations, was simple: This is the work of God. He is the one doing it.
With the assistance of Mother Dominique-Henri of the Sisters of the Presentation at Tours, he established the first house at Frasne-le-ChΓ’teau, near BesanΓ§on, in eastern France, on August 14, 1866. The congregation was formally the Dominican Sisters of Bethany. On Christmas Day 1868, Lataste celebrated Mass in the house for the last time and gave the Dominican habit to the first former prisoner to enter — a young woman who received the name SΕur NoΓ«l.
The Last Winter and the Death at Thirty-Six
Lataste had been ill, intermittently and seriously, for most of his religious life. The tuberculosis or similar wasting disease that marked him was well advanced by the autumn of 1868. He dictated the constitutions of the Sisters of Bethany to Mother Dominique-Henri because he was too weak to write them. He asked a fellow Dominican to complete what he could not.
When asked what would become of his work if he died, he said: It is the work of God. He will take care of things.
On March 10, 1869, he died. He was thirty-six years old, a priest for six years, a founder for three. He had spent the last minutes expressing his love for the sisters and his gratitude to God. He died, the sources record, while singing the Salve Regina — the ancient Dominican antiphon of the Church's prayer to Mary — as he approached its end.
He was buried initially at the sisters' convent at Frasne-le-ChΓ’teau and later translated, when the sisters moved, to Montferrand-le-ChΓ’teau, and then to the sisters' chapel when the cause for beatification was opened.
The Beatification and the Legacy
The canonical process opened in 1937. It was long — the Positio on his virtues was submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in two parts in 1996 and 1998. Pope Benedict XVI declared him Venerable on June 1, 2007. The miracle required for beatification — a healing investigated in 1998 — was approved by Benedict XVI on June 27, 2011. The beatification was celebrated on June 3, 2012, at BesanΓ§on, with Cardinal Angelo Amato representing the Holy Father.
The Dominican Sisters of Bethany continue. At the time of his beatification they had houses in France, Switzerland, and near Turin in Italy, all maintaining the founding charism: a community of women religious among whom no distinction is made between those who came from prison and those who did not, where the daily work includes visits to nearby prisons, where the heart of the life is contemplative prayer.
In 1998, a Lay Dominican Fraternity inspired by Lataste's vision was established in a prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts — men who are serving sentences and men from outside the prison, praying together as Dominicans, with no distinction of status in the community. It was canonically established as a Lay Dominican Fraternity in 2005.
His patronage of women prisoners and ex-prisoners is the literal content of his apostolate. His patronage of those society has discarded is the theological argument of Les RΓ©habilitΓ©es — that the discarded are not beyond God, and that society's discarding of them is not God's discarding of them. His patronage of rehabilitation is his conviction, which he argued publicly and built structurally, that whom God has pardoned is pardoned absolutely, and that the Church's task is to make this real in the world.
The Magdalene connection that ran through everything he did was not sentimentality but theology: the woman who loved more, who chose the better part, who had advanced further in the way of divine love than the model of virtue — she was the patron of the house. And the house was open to anyone who wanted to come in.
| Born | September 5, 1832 — Cadillac-sur-Garonne, Gironde, France; baptised the following day |
| Died | March 10, 1869 — Frasne-le-ChΓ’teau, Franche-ComtΓ©, France; tuberculosis; died singing the Salve Regina; aged 36 |
| Feast Day | March 10 |
| Order / Vocation | Order of Preachers (O.P.) — Dominican priest; entered novitiate at Flavigny, November 4, 1857; ordained February 8, 1863, Marseille |
| Beatified | June 3, 2012 — Pope Benedict XVI (represented by Cardinal Angelo Amato), BesanΓ§on, France |
| Venerable | June 1, 2007 — Pope Benedict XVI |
| Foundations | Dominican Sisters of Bethany (Congregation de BΓ©thanie) — founded August 14, 1866, at Frasne-le-ChΓ’teau, near BesanΓ§on; houses in France, Switzerland, and Italy; Bethany-Norfolk Lay Dominican Fraternity, Massachusetts (2005) |
| Patron of | Prison ministry · Women prisoners and ex-prisoners · Those society has discarded · The rehabilitation of former offenders · The Dominican Sisters of Bethany |
| Known as | PΓ¨re Lataste · Apostle of Prisons · Alcide-Vital Lataste (baptismal name); Jean-Joseph Lataste (religious name); Jean-Marie Joseph Lataste (in some Catholic sources) |
| Key writings | Les RΓ©habilitΓ©es (Rehabilitated Women), 1866 — pamphlet circulated to journalists and government officials; constitutions of the Sisters of Bethany (dictated to Mother Dominique-Henri, completed posthumously) |
| Relics | Sisters' chapel, Montferrand-le-ChΓ’teau, Franche-ComtΓ©, France |
| Their words | "This is the work of God. He is the one doing it." — on the founding of Bethany · "When God loves us and gives us his grace, he does not ask us what we have been; he is only concerned with what we are — not with how far we have fallen, but with how much we love." — from Les RΓ©habilitΓ©s |
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