Exegete, writer, poet… Gérard Bessière was above all “a seeker of light, who wanted to understand men through companionship with Jesus»underlines Yves Bescond, the founder of Diabase, who published the last works of the priest who died on Sunday December 8, at the age of 96.
Author of around fifty works, Gérard Bessière became known to the general public in 1993 with the publication by Gallimard of his book Jesus, the unexpected God.
For twenty years (1972-1992), he commented on the word of God as a preacher at the France Culture mass. His homilies, collected under the title The Shock Jesus, still nourish today the Sunday meditation of Guy and Marie-Françoise Ferrand, who met him when he was national chaplain of the national education teaching teams. “His comments are real gems, which always remain very currentsaid the couple. He is like a brother who made us grow: when we moved away from the Church, he brought us closer to Jesus. »

Gérard Bessière celebrated mass in a chapel set up in the basement of his house in Luzech, near Cahors.
Committed to deepening the intuitions of the Second Vatican Council, Gérard Bessière claimed, in fact, a “free” relationship with the ecclesial institution. “If he calls himself a “heretic”, it is only in the etymological sense: he has resolutely “chosen” to relativize the injunctions and the heaviness of the institution, to favor the subversive, radically free and innovative speech of the Gospel»we read on the cover of The Heretic Child, a journey with Jesus (2016).
Spirit of “resistance”
This spirit of « résistance » was notably manifested in 2009 on the occasion of the lifting of the excommunications of the Lefebvrist bishops, by Pope Benedict XVI. Gérard Bessière published an open letter entitled, I excommunicated Benedict XVI!
Press and publishing man, Gérard Bessière worked at Éditions du Cerf from 1969 to 1988; he was a journalist at the weekly The life from 1975 to 1988. With his “Savoyard friend and friend”Hyacinthe Vulliez, they were “shock signatures from the Christian weekly (…) founded by Georges Hourdin. Their theological influence was decisive during these post-conciliar years when the newspaper defended an editorial line of openness on religious and political levels.»recalls journalist Michel Cool-Tadel, in a tribute published on his Facebook page.
Gérard Bessière had launched magazines like The notebooks of the free future, on questions of Church and society, or even Our Historya religious history review linked to the weekly Telerama. He had retired to his village of Luzech, near Cahors, where he remained active. Until recently, he continued to organize “seminars” which brought together thinkers, writers, personalities, etc.
“Every morning, he sat down to write, testifies Yves Bescond. He had a deep love of men, faces, landscapes that he evoked with simple and profound words.. »