Recently I went to Rennes, France, to learn more about the life of Benjamin Marie Petit, who lived in the early nineteenth century and served as a missionary to the Potawatomi of northern Indiana and southwest Michigan. I scoured the Internet, wrote to archives, had a francophone friend call churches—nothing! I was feeling desperate, and desperation often leads to prayer: “Father Petit, lead me to places I should visit when in Rennes.” Suddenly, I recalled that I had contacted a descendant of the French priest’s brother several weeks earlier via LinkedIn. I had forgotten all about it, but immediately after my petition, I saw that I had received a message from Petit’s descendant. I responded right away, and within a few hours I had the address for the family home, the name of the street where the priest had been born, and the name of the family church, the last being quite a find in a medieval town full of churches.

My eighteen-year-old daughter joined me on the trip, and as we walked around the town, we imagined the young Petit traversing the streets we were now strolling, praying in the churches we were now praying in, and sitting and sipping at the many cafés that line the narrow streets where we sat and sipped. As we did so, we began to notice something: Everyone was nice. Really nice—as my daughter quipped with an eyebrow raised, “suspiciously nice.”

We began to speculate that the young missionary was behind all this kindness. Was he so pleased that someone came from America to study his life and mission that he brought out the best of Rennes to welcome us? As we continued to walk the streets, this wonderful thought never quite left my mind.

Until Petit left to attend the Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris, he had lived his entire life in Rennes. He was born on Rue de la Motte Fablet, close to the Parlement building, where it is likely his father, as a court of appeals attorney, plied his trade. When Benjamin was five years old, his father died at age twenty-seven. The family then moved to the first floor at Thirty-Four Place des Lices. When he left home every day, he would have seen the ruins of the city’s fifteenth-century ramparts and the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, both of which are about a block from his doorstep. For Petit’s entire time in Rennes, the cathedral was being renovated, so the Notre-Dame-en-Saint-Mélaine served as the pro-cathedral. He attended with his family the much smaller Saint Etienne, a two-minute walk from his home.

There is a centuries-old market on the street where Petit grew up. One can imagine his mother shopping there every weekend, and, once Benjamin was old enough, dispatching him to do the same. Eventually, Petit attended the University of Rennes and later its law school. He practiced law for a few years and developed a reputation as a public speaker. Did he work in the courts housed in the imposing Parlement building, just like his father? Did he reflect on the priests who were tried and executed there a few decades earlier during the Terror?

No one knows exactly when or how, but Petit was called to the priesthood. Was this something that had been tugging at his heart while attending Mass at Saint Etienne or during a quiet moment within the ancient majesty of Notre-Dame-en-Saint-Mélaine? Whenever it was, it led him to leave his profession and to enter the seminary in Paris.

We returned to Paris after spending two days in Rennes picturing Petit walking here, praying there, laughing with friends there; or looking to a window and imagining him telling his mother he was leaving his profession for the seminary, and then, a couple years later, leaving for the American wilderness; and then his mother sitting by the same window, with unimaginable pain, learning that her young missionary son had died. After arriving in Paris, we met Petit’s descendant at the fountain in front of Saint-Sulpice. We shook hands, walked to a café, ordered a couple of La Goudale I.P.A.s, and marveled, on this beautiful Parisian evening, at the legacy of Father Benjamin Petit, who still works wonders in people’s lives.

This article appears in the Assumption 2025 issue of The Lamp.