Father Joseph Gerard was born on the 12th March 1831 at Bouxières-Chênes, in the diocese of Nancy. Son of John Gerard and Ursule Stofflet, honest and hard-working country folk, Joseph received a modest primary and secondary education.
In 1851 he entered the Oblate Congregation at Notre-Dame de l’Osier. His theological formation, begun at the major seminary of Nancy, pursued in Marseilles and completed in South Africa, was not all it might have been. There was certainly nothing to suggest any academic brilliance in the field of theology, and indeed he seems to have been completely ignorant of what we know today as a social science. And yet this was a missionary destined to achieve such remarkable success in Lesotho.
Father Gerard was the oldest of five children; he grew up in a deeply Christian family. His formation in the family was supported by the example of the local Christian community and by the Catholic village school. Early in his life, he heard Christ’s call to the priestly ministry. While he was preparing for ordination at the Seminary of the diocese of Nancy, he felt called to the missionary life and joined the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Congregation recently founded by Saint Eugene de Mazenod, Bishop of Marseilles in France.
Still a deacon, he left Europe in 1853 for Southern Africa—and he never returned to visit his country and his family again. After his priestly ordination by Bishop Allard at Pietermaritzburg in 1854, he worked among the AmaZulu in the new Apostolic Vicariate of Natal. The small group of Oblates founded two missions, St. Michael’s and Our Lady of Sorrows. But they met with many difficulties. While others continued missionary work among the Zulus, Father Gerard was sent to Lesotho to start missionary work there. He arrived in Lesotho, together with Bishop Allard and Brother Bernard in 1862, and was courteously received by King Moshoeshoe I. Soon the first Catholic mission was founded—and called “Village of the Mother of Jesus”—in what is now known as Roma Valley. After 14 years of pioneer work at Roma, Fr. Gerard founded the Mission of St. Monica in the North of Lesotho. There he dedicated himself not only to the Basotho of Lesotho. He also frequently visited neighbouring areas in what is now Free State Province, attending to the Catholics there and spreading the Good News, especially among the Basotho employed on the farms. After 21 years at St. Michael’s he returned to Roma in 1898 and worked there as a zealous missionary until his death on May 19th, 1914.