GUEBRIANT (Budes de), Jean-Baptiste-Marie. — Born on 11 Dec. 1860 in Paris to a family of the old Breton nobility. In 1880 he entered the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice and on 13 Sept. 1883 transferred to the Seminary of the Foreign Missions of Paris. Ordained a priest on 5 July 1885, he departed for the mission in southern Szechwan on 7 Oct. of the same year.
From 1886 to 1894 he evangelized the vast and difficult region of Kientchang, now the diocese of Sichang. Named pro-vicar in 1894, he had to undertake various delicate missions to Peking, Japan, Paris, and Rome. In 1905 he resumed evangelization in Kientchang, of which he became the first apostolic vicar in 1910. There he founded numerous schools and a seminary with forty aspirants. In 1907 he guided the Ollone mission through the hitherto unexplored Lolo country. In 1915 he was transferred to Canton, where he prepared the division into four vicariates. In 1919 Benedict XV appointed him visitor of the missions of China and in 1921 visitor of Siberia. In that same year he was elected Superior General of the Society of the Foreign Missions of Paris. During the fourteen years of his superiorship, Monsignor de G., whom Pius XI was later to call the greatest missionary of modern times, kept alive a burning zeal among his missionaries, whom he encouraged on the spot during his long journey to the Far East (1931–32). He promoted the cause of the indigenous hierarchy, preparing in India, Indochina, China, and Japan the transfer of dioceses and vicariates to the secular clergy of those countries. On 10 Dec. 1921 he was named titular archbishop of Marcianopoli. D. 6 March 1935.