François Corentin Le Mahec was born on March 10, 1875 in the region of Breton, Brittany, France, in the commune of Gouesnarc'h, part of the diocese of Quimper, Finistère.^[1] His mother died when he was only two, and his father remarried a few years later. François came from a pious family and was descended from a long line of sacristans, starting from his great grandfather all the way down to his brother.^[2]His path however would take him further into church life. He attended the apostolic school of Poitiers at a young age and on September 7, 1892, he entered the seminary to begin his official journey towards priesthood.

However, at the age of 19, he left for his military service before he could be called to the priesthood.^[3] He later returned to the seminary to complete his training and was ordained a priest on September 26, 1897, being one of the youngest in his class.^[4] After a short visit to his hometown, he left France on November 21, 1897 to make his way to his mission region of Malaya.^[5]

Arriving in Malaya in December that year, Father Le Mahec was immediately assigned to the parish of Penang which had been lacking in resident priests for a few months. He was placed under the supervision of Father Victor Renard, who was director of the parish of Pulau Tikus and whom he learned the Tamil language from.^[6] Not too long after this, Father Jean-Emmanuel Diridollou who was in charge of the Indian colony of Sousei-Paléam at Bagan Serai in Perak passed away, leaving the colony in need of a priest. Despite Father Le Mahec’s youth and his relative newness to the mission, Bishop Fee decided that he was well-suited to taking over the mission at the colony, and he was assigned there in 1898.^[7]

An MEP report from the same year noted this change and some of the difficulties that Father Le Mahec faced in taking over from Father Diridollou who had overseen the colony for eight years and had left a great impact on the residents there. “But they do not discourage me, because there is also the beautiful side of the medal. So, during the whole month of October, I had more than 100 people, not counting the children, who, every morning, came to hear mass, recite the rosary, and follow the Rosary exercises. The men were the most numerous,” reflected Father Le Mahec.^[8]

In addition to trying to win over the congregation, he had to deal with the various misfortunes that befell the crops and rice fields that were the colonies’ main resource for sustaining their livelihood. To keep up morale, he himself got involved in the agricultural work which was hard labour.^[9]

Father Diridollou had succeeded in his dream of building a couple of schools and a presbytery but did not get the chance to fulfil his ultimate goal of building a more permanent concrete church, a task which Father Le Mahec saw as his obligation to see through. After saving whatever he could over the next seven years, he finally was able to lay the first stone for the church in May 1905, and it was blessed by Bishop Barillion on September 10 of the same year.^[10]

During this time, in addition to their respective work in their parish churches, Father Le Mahec and Father Renard were tasked with helping to start new chapels and churches within Kuala Lumpur to accommodate the growing number of Indian Catholics there. A chapel dedicated to St Anne in Sentul in 1906 by Father Renard was rededicated to St Joseph in 1908 on behalf of the railway workers. A Tamil school was established that still stands today as St Joseph’s Tamil School, Sentul.^[11]In 1911, Father Le Mahec was appointed parish priest in charge of the Indian Catholics in the Kuala Lumpur-Selangor area, and he set to work on raising funds to build a new church. On February 2, 1913, Bishop Barillion blessed the first stone of what would become St Anthony’s Church which was completed on September 21, 1913, although it was not to the standard that Father Le Mahec would have liked.^[12]

In 1920, while serving as parish priest of St Anthony’s after it was established, Father Le Mahec returned to France and his hometown for a visit.^[13] In the years that followed, he would bless the new bells that at St Anthony’s and work towards building a new presbytery which he would move into not too long after in 1923.^[14]In 1924, he delighted to see the Ladies of St Maure open a Tamil School for girls a little outside Kuala Lumpur.^[15] He then felt the need to start working on plans for another church to replace St Joseph’s chapel to host the large number of Indian parishioners within the city. However, as he started the plans, his health began to deteriorate. He was diagnosed with throat cancer and went to Singapore in September 1926 for surgery.^[16]The surgery was unsuccessful and he succumbed to the disease, passing away early in the morning on May 10, 1927.^[17]

Father Le Mahec was well-loved by his colleagues and parishioners and left a legacy in the form of several chapels and churches, in particular St Anthony’s which is still parish to a good number of not just Indian Catholics but Catholics as a whole.