Pierre Ceyrac

Pierre Ceyrac (4 February 1914 – 30 May 2012) was a French Jesuit priest who worked for 75 years outside his home country. He was celebrated for his work in both France and India, earning the French Légion d'honneur in 2005.

Career Ceyrac was attracted to a religious vocation early in life and in October 1931, became a novice of the Society of Jesus.

At the age of 23, he earned a degree in Classical Letters and Philology from Sorbonne. He then chose to follow in the footsteps of his uncle Charles Ceyrac, who had been a Jesuit missionary in Southern India.

In 1937, he sailed from Marseille to India, where he would spend the rest of his life. He earned a degree in Tamil and Sanskrit from Pachaiyappa’s College where he also studied Vedanta and the Upanishads.

He was ordained as a priest in 1945 at the Jesuit Seminary in Kurseong, West Bengal and finished his tertianship in 1947. Soon after, he was named as the chaplain to St. Joseph's College in Tiruchirappalli. In 1955, he became chaplain of the All India Catholic University Federation, a post he held until 1967.

His first major project began in 1957, when he and groups of students worked to help the poor in a village near Pondicherry. They built roads, houses, and clinics in a place they called "Cherian Nagar" where 20,000 Hindus, Muslims, and Christians lived.

Father Ceyrac continued his work well into his nineties, coming to the aid of fishing villages affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He spent the last years of his life teaching at Loyola College in Chennai. Throughout his life, he campaigned for the rights and dignity of the Dalits and was an advocate for human rights. He died 30 May 2012, at the age of 98 in Chennai.