Pierre Lambert de la Motte (16 January 1624 – 15 January 1679) was a French bishop. He was a founding member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and became a missionary in Asia.
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Born in La Boissière, Calvados, Lambert de la Motte was recruited by Alexander de Rhodes as a secular clergy volunteer to become a missionary in Asia, together with François Pallu and Ignace Cotolendi. They were sent to the Far East as Apostolic vicars.[1][2][3]
In 1658 Pierre Lambert de la Motte was nominated Bishop of Beirut, Vicar Apostolic of Cochinchina. The three bishops left France (1660–62) to go to their respective missions, and crossed Persia and India on foot, since Portugal would have refused to take non-Padroado missionnaries by ship, and the Dutch and the English refused to take Catholic missionaries.[4]
Mgr Lambert left Marseilles on 26 November 1660 accompanied by Fathers De Bourges and Deydier,[5] and reached Mergui in Siam 18 months later. Mgr Pallu joined Mgr Lambert in the capital of Siam, Ayutthaya, after 24 months overland, and Mgr Cotolendi died upon arrival in India on 6 August 1662.[6] Siam thus became the first country to receive the evangelization efforts of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, to be followed by new missions 40 years later in Cochinchina, Tonkin and parts of China.[7]
Mgr Lampert together with Pallu founded in 1665-66 the general seminary in Ayutthaya, Siam[8] (the Seminary of Saint Joseph[9] then Seminary of the Holy Angels, at the origin of the College General now in Penang, Malaysia).
In 1670, Mgr Lampert went to Tonkin together with the secular priests Jacques de Bourges and Gabriel Bouchard to establish a church there, and created the congregation of Amantes de la Croix de Jésus-Christ.[10]
On 23 July 1677, after 12 years in Siam, Mgr Lampert went to Cohinchina to take up his see.[11]
He soon returned to Siam, where he died in 1679, in the capital Ayutthaya.