Where he belongs

Gene LeBoeuf moved to Ville Platte for a job but ended staying for a woman -- a woman that helped him become closer to his faith and God.
“I came over to work for my cousin but that didn’t work out,” LeBoeuf said. “For a little while I thought it was a mistake but that is the year I met my wife. The next year we were married here at Our Lady Queen of All Saints Church and started attending services here as well.”
LeBoeuf was born in the small community of Pointe-aux-Chenes down in Terrebonne Parish. LeBoeuf was raised in New Orleans, and then Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (where he attended a school associated with the St. Augustine Seminary), before finishing his learning at St. Thomas High School in Houston, Texas.
LeBoeuf then studied accounting at University of Houston, as he worked bookkeeping jobs at a men’s clothing store and also at a Firestone Tire shop.
Then in 1978 LeBoeuf was presented with the opportunity to work in Evangeline Parish. That job only lasted six months but during that time is when LeBoeuf met and fell in love with Sherrell Morein.
“I had a car so I had to change insurance because I had moved from Texas to Louisiana,” LeBoeuf said. “So the insurance agent I used had a Christmas Party at his house. My future wife’s family also used that same agent and they were at the party.”
In 1979, LeBoeuf and Morein were married and the two would spend the next three-plus decades together before a fatal heart attack took Morein away three years ago.
Even though LeBoeuf was Catholic, and even learned Latin while attending school in Bay St. Louis, he still credits his late wife for his devotion to God and Catholicism.
“My wife brought me closer to the church,” LeBoeuf said. “She regularly attended mass. I guess you might say before I met her that I wasn’t as involved as I needed to be but she changed all that.”
As LeBoeuf began to make living here locally, first as the bookkeeper for the Evangeline Parish Police Jury for 16 years and then 12 years as the Executive Director of the Evangeline Parish Council on Aging, he began to get more involved with Our Lady Queen of All Saints Church.
“When I came here my wife was already very strong with her faith,” LeBoeuf said. “As we settled down together I got involved with the parish. There was a process here at that time called The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). It was a process of sharing the faith with former Catholics or those who married someone from a different faith as a way of trying to bring them back to the church.”
LeBoeuf’s involvement with the RCIA had him attend several different conferences with the Diocese of Lafayette and was part of the church’s outreach program.
Then in 1987, LeBoeuf was approached about becoming a deacon. After a six-year process, Bishop Harry Flynn ordained LeBoeuf as a deacon at Our Lady Queen of All Saints, a position he has proudly held ever since.
“It was a surprise to me to be asked to be a deacon,” said LeBoeuf, who also serves on the church’s Parish Council. “But I thought that it was something that I could do. Serving as a deacon has helped me hold on to my faith and has helped me to keep improving on my faith.”
Not even a quadruple bypass surgery he had five years ago has slowed LeBoeuf down. The heart attack he suffered forced him to retire but he is as energized as ever about his faith and Catholicism.
LeBoeuf speaks passionately about everything from the outreach efforts of Pope Francis, what life was like at seminaries during the Middle Ages, as well as ‘waking up’ former Catholics to return to the flock of the Catholic Church.
“It is like a sleepiness,” said LeBoeuf, regarding those Catholics that have left the church. “Some people have left the church and have fallen asleep but it is good to see people waking up and coming back to the church.”
LeBoeuf also has seen firsthand that there are many younger people in the community that have the devotion and passion to spread the word of God.
“There are more than a handful of people here that I would like to see go to the deaconate,” said LeBoeuf, who also performs the Rosary (sometimes in French) at local funeral homes. “Because they are very strong in their faith and probably stronger than me.”
LeBoeuf prepares now for the next chapter in his life of serving God. LeBoeuf has been asked, and has accepted to go through the year-long process at Mother of the Redeemer Monastery in nearby Plaisance to become an oblate.
An oblate is an individual that resides in general society that makes a formal and private promise to serve God by following the Rule of the Order in their private life.
“I always try to live a good life,” LeBoeuf said. “The life that God wants me to live.”