About the Notre Dame Prize Laureate
Haitian Archbishop Louis Kébreau has spent over 35 years in service to the Roman Catholic Church and the people of Haiti.
Born in Jeremie, Haiti in 1938, Msgr. Kébreau trained as an agronomist at the Salesian Institute of Agronomy in the Dominican Republic and professed at the age of 25. He earned a master’s degree in pastoral counseling from Saint Paul University in Ottawa in 1973 and was ordained as a Salesian priest in Sherbrooke, Canada in 1974.
Pope John Paul II appointed Msgr. Kébreau auxiliary bishop of Port-au-Prince in 1986 and bishop of Hinche in 1998. In 2008, he was named Archbishop of Cap-Haïtien by Pope Benedict XVI. He has served as president of the Haitian Conference of Catholic Bishops since 2005.
Throughout his career, Msgr. Kébreau has taken a special interest in improving access to education in Haiti. He spent 12 years as the director of a Salesian school in Petion-Ville, Haiti, and from 1987 to 1996 served as the president of the Episcopal Commission on Catholic Education. Msgr. Kébreau was also president of youth ministry for the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) from 1989 to 1993.
In response to the January 2010 earthquake, the Archbishop has exercised vision and decisive leadership in a number of key arenas.
First, he has led the Haitian Catholic Church to unite behind a “one Church response” for rebuilding and recovery. Working closely with the U.S. Bishops Conference and Catholic Relief Services, Msgr. Kébreau helped create and now oversees the Program for the Reconstruction of the Church in Haiti—or PROCHE (which means “close by” in French).
The new organization, responsible for the coordination, construction quality, and transparency of Church efforts to rebuild 70 parishes and numerous other structures destroyed in the earthquake, has the potential to serve as a model for the nation as a whole as it tackles the daunting task of rebuilding.
In addition, Msgr. Kébreau has advocated for a coordinated national strategy for rebuilding and improving Catholic schools, which make up roughly 30% of schools in Haiti and are a vital source of quality education.
He has been a vocal advocate for the more than a million Haitians left homeless by the earthquake, hundreds of thousands of whom still live in squalid and unsafe tent camps. He has called on the world’s governments, international organizations such as the United Nations, and nongovernmental aid agencies to follow through on their promises to help Haiti’s recovery efforts.
In the face of opposition from powerful international agencies and his own government, the Archbishop has insisted that the origins of Haiti’s deadly cholera epidemic be investigated and made public, so that future outbreaks can be prevented in Haiti and other disaster zones around the world.
The country had been free of cholera for decades when it reappeared in October 2010, subsequently sickening nearly 5 percent of the population and further burdening a public health system already pushed past its limits by the January 2010 earthquake.
