“I do the best job in the world”, Father Amédée Anthonioz had slipped to us in April 2021 during an interview in our columns. It is with “sadness” that his family and the diocese of Annecy announced the death of the man who has become a local figure in parish and community life.
Born in Annecy in 1951 and ordained a priest at the age of 23, on October 5, 1980 in Cluses, Father Amédée, as everyone affectionately called him, officiated for two years in Cluses, then two more in Saint-François-de-Sales. of Thonon-les-Bains before spending 24 years in Beaumont before finally arriving in Fillinges where he took care of the parish of La Trinité in the Pays des Voirons.
“Father Amédée was a man passionate about the Gospel and meeting people”
Wherever he went, Father Amédée left a touching memory among the parishioners. We couldn’t miss it with his blue Fiat flocked with a “Jesus Team” sticker: the car will even make the full page of the newspaper The cross where the priest ardently defended the need for the parish press.
Father Emmanuel Blanc, vicar general of the diocese of Annecy remembers a man “passionate about the Gospel and meeting people. He enjoyed studying the Bible and spending free time with people. Like any passionate person, he did not leave anyone indifferent, arousing the admiration of some, but also capable of strong reactions that may have hurt others,” he recalls. Father Amédée had his convictions which he fiercely defended. Firmly opposed to what he called “the office church”, he insisted on the importance of social ties.
A bond between the Church and its parishioners that he tried to maintain during the pandemic, especially during the confinements. He had created his own YouTube channel to keep the link. And for several months, after his morning prayer, he sent parishioners his reflection of the day on WhatsApp. With humor and passion, the country priest got up to speed. In his last WhatsApp message dated July 30, Father Amédée also delivered this reflection: “We do not use God, he is useless. He serves because he loves! »
Disability as a spiritual force
Physically handicapped from birth, Father Amédée had made his own Way of the Cross. “As everywhere, disability is not easy to live with. Also in the Church. It was difficult at first, I was put in the way, ”he testified. He made it a strength. An asset and a meaning in his spiritual life. “His handicap, which made him attentive to those who suffer, led him to develop a spirituality insisting on the mercy of God”, emphasizes Father Emmanuel Blanc.
“A man of great faith”, this is also what Bernard Boccard, mayor of Cranves-Sales, remembers, who expressed his great sadness after learning of the disappearance of “a faithful friend […] very close to people in need, the poor, the sick to whom he brought his comfort and help. He will have marked his passage in the town of Cranves-Sales where many people appreciated him as he was.
This closeness to the most fragile came to him from someone in particular, whom he considered a second mother. Little cousin of Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Father Amédée had great admiration for Charles de Gaulle’s niece, a survivor of the camps, who gave her life to defend the weakest. “In this world where so many people do not see the end of the tunnel, we need this kind of people as a model”, greeted the second cousin who had pronounced in 2002, alongside Cardinal Lustiger, the funeral mass at Notre Dame of Paris.
Geneva. Death of Father Amédée, a life dedicated to faith and to his neighbor