Gérard Moussay

Gérard Moussay (16 August 1932, Brecé, Mayenne - 1 February 2012 in Paris) was a French Catholic missionary. He was also a specialist on Cam and Minangkabau languages.

Biography

1954–1975 Born from a farming family, he was the oldest of four children. He studied at the Petit and Grand Séminaries of Laval before joining Missions Etrangères de Paris on 20 September 1954. Ordained on 29 June 1957 at Laval, soon after he was sent to Viet Nam for his first mission of Nha Trang. He studied Vietnamese at Banam (about 60 km southeast Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia). In 1954, when Viet Nam was divided into the North and the South of the 17th parallel, some hundreds of thousands of northern refugees (mostly devout Catholics) were settled by small groups in different southern provinces especially where the field was not yet exploited because most of them came from the countryside in the North. So between 1958 and 1968, Gérard Moussay was in charge of these Catholics in two provinces of Ninh Thuân and Binh Tuy. Particularly he founded two parishes of Hiêp Nghia and Hiêp An. He set up the Cam Cultural Centre to study the Cam language and to form a team of researchers with the cooperation of old Cam scholars. They collected ancient texts, translated them and published them. Afterwards, he was instructed in the Minangkabau language. The close link between these languages with that of Cam people made his task easier. Between August 1978 and May 1979, he undertook a course of Arabic and islamology at Rome. Devoting to his duty of assistant-priest (1978-1981) then priest (1981-1993) at Bukittinggi, meanwhile he drew up the grammar of Minangkabau language in which he had a doctorate at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)) in 1982. Furthermore, by means of references might be found out all of literature of proverbs, sentences, popular stories…. This dictionary will be published only in 1995 in Paris.

1993–2012

Early 1993, Gérard Moussay was appointed to carry out the Archives of Missions Etrangères de Paris of which he was in charge until his death early 2012. Throughout these years, with the help of some assistants he made an inventory of numerous documents such as dictionaries, travel books, correspondence between missionaries… throughout continents and centuries. He remade the internal organization in view to receiving researchers and students putting at their disposal, along with his own experience, the documentary treasures dating back to many centuries. Under his direction were published many books (directories of follow-members of Missions Etrangères, their bibliographies ... ). He took an active part during the exhibition celebrating the 350th anniversary of Missions Etrangères's foundation in 2008.