Jacques Hamel was born to a small Norman family at Darnétal outside Rouen and was ordained priest for the Archdiocese of Rouen on July 8, 1958. He served the Archdiocese as parish priest of various Norman working-class parishes for fifty-eight years — most of those years quietly, in successive rural parishes around Rouen. He had formally retired in 2005 at seventy-five but, at the request of the Archdiocese of Rouen (suffering from a serious shortage of priests in the Seine-Maritime area), continued to serve as auxiliary parish priest at the small church of Saint-Étienne in the working-class commune of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in the southern Rouen suburbs, where he had been since 2008.
On the morning of Tuesday, July 26, 2016, Father Hamel was celebrating the regular weekday morning Mass at 9:25 AM at the Church of Saint-Étienne with a small congregation of four: two parishioners (an elderly couple, the Petits), a Sister of the Sacred Heart (Sister Danielle), and a fourth person. Two French-born ISIS-affiliated young men, Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean, both 19, broke into the church, forced Father Hamel to kneel at the foot of the altar, and (according to subsequent investigation) the man Kermiche cut his throat. The eighty-five-year-old priest's last recorded words, spoken aloud while being attacked: 'Va-t'en, Satan' ('Go away, Satan').
The attack — the first ISIS-claimed killing of a Catholic priest in his church in modern European history — produced a major French national reaction and a substantial inter-faith response (the Muslim mayor of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray and dozens of local imams attended the funeral Mass at Rouen Cathedral). Pope Francis, addressing the question on the return flight from Krakow on July 31, 2016, declared Father Hamel a martyr 'killed in odium fidei' and immediately initiated the process for the dispensation of the five-year waiting period. The cause for beatification was formally opened April 14, 2017. The Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints confirmed the validity of the diocesan investigation on June 9, 2020. The cause is currently in the Roman phase of theological-medical examination.