The body of Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, ninth Archbishop of Port-au Prince, was unearthed amid the ruins of his former office. Near by lay the bodies of his former students, trainee priests for the diocese of Port-au-Prince, whose seminaries, principal churches, episcopal office, residence and cathedral have been “reduced to rubble”, according to the papal nuncio in Haiti.
Monsignor Bernadito Auza, said that CIFOR, an institute for nuns and priests, had also collapsed while students inside it took part in a conference. “Everywhere you can hear cries from under the rubble,” he said.
Elected Archbishop of Port-au-Prince in 2008, Serge Miot ran a large diocese containing more than 80 parishes serving a local population of four million, of whom an estimated 60 per cent are Roman Catholic.
In September 2005 he hit the headlines for suspending from ministry the Liberation Theologian priest Father G?rard Jean-Juste, a fervent champion of human rights in Haiti linked to Fanmi Lavalas, the political party associated with the former priest and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
“While I was dying in jail, around September 2005, Bishop Joseph Serge Miot came in on a Sunday,” Jean-Juste later recalled. “He talked to me for a while and then handed me a yellow envelope with two pages in it. Inside was a cover letter and the sanction telling me I was suspended from acting as a priest.”
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Jean-Juste later urged the Vatican to overturn the suspension, saying that he had been falsely accused of applying to be a candidate for the presidency. His supporters had wished to put him forward.
Serge Miot denounced Jean-Juste’s imprisonment by the interim Government of G?rard Latortue on charges — later dropped — that Jean-Juste had been involved in the murder of a journalist.
The founder of a charity for poor families in Port-au-Prince, Serge Miot taught his philosophy students in the local seminary of Saint Jacques that priesthood was not a career “but a mission”. He was also the seminary rector. “He was a demanding and understanding priest, a man of great discretion and humility,” said Father Michel M?nard, the superior general of the Society of the Priests of Saint Jacques, a missionary order that has operated for more than 50 years in Haiti. “He was very welcoming to his priests.”
Joseph Serge Miot was born in 1946, in J?r?mie, the principal town of the department of La Grande-Anse in western Haiti. After studying in Port-au-Prince and in Rome, he was ordained a priest in 1975. Initially he served in his home town, J?r?mie. In July 1997 Pope John Paul II named him coadjutor bishop of Port-au-Prince, and on March 1, 2008 he was made Archbishop of Port-au-Prince.
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Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, was born on November 23, 1946. He died in the Haiti earthquake on January 12, 2010, aged 63