Eventually, his bishop supported his choice, but the opposition of his father was so strong that the young priest left to enter the seminary of the Paris Foreign Missions without even saying goodbye to his family.

During his 12 years in India, Brésillac served in many capacities,as Curate at Salern and as Superior of the minor seminary at Pondicherry.

He wanted to establish an indigenous clergy, with their own hierarchy, capable of taking on responsibility for the missions, with Europeans acting only as assistants.

He was also distressed by many of the cultural realities he discovered in India, particularly the caste system, a practice that assigned people to strictly defined social classes of "desirables" and "undesirables".

They accepted this system as part of the culture of the people and opposed his democratic desire to train local clergy.

Dismayed by this attitude and by the conflicts that the opposing views created within the community of missionaries, the young bishop eventually resigned his post and returned to Rome.

In 1858, the first SMA missionaries (priests and brothers) set out for what was the newly created Vicariate Apostolic of Sierra Leone in western Africa.

Despite the tragedy, the newly trained SMA missionary priests who had remained behind in France were still eager to go to Africa to carry out the mission started by their Founder.