Secretary of the Bishop’s House of Marseilles from 1838 to 1842

Honoré Marc Cailhol was born in Marseilles on April 25, 1807. He was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Fortuné de Mazenod on June 16, 1832 and appointed secretary general of the bishop’s house on January 1, 1838. In his diary entry of April 15, 1839. Bishop de Mazenod complained that Marc lacked respect for him as bishop and left to the porter the tasks of serving his Mass and accompanying him during his administering confirmation on Monday at the bishop’s house.

The secretary general gave as excuse his overload of work of writing letters for the bishop, recopying them in the Register of administrative letters, drawing up official acts and recopying them as well into the Register of “Insinuations.” From 1823 to 1861 there are seven volumes of copied administrative letters of about 300 pages each and five volumes of “Insinuations” containing some 700 documents in each one.

In 1842, Marc suffered a stroke which forced him to retire. As a result, he left his work at the bishop’s house where he had lived until then. Little by little, he recovered and founded a canonically established needlework school for indigent Catholic young women on December 15, 1851. The school was established to make liturgical vestments, altar linens, sacred vessels for poverty stricken churches in France and in the foreign missions. Canon Marc Cailhol died on February 23, 1860.

Yvon Beaudoin, o.m.i.