Gérard Roussel

[1] This group was characterized by evangelical sensibilities, but all the while remaining Catholics, at a time when religious identities were unclear and a matter of dispute, due to the very recent Protestant Reformation.

Gérard Roussel, along with Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, was described by the historian Thierry Wanegffelen as being "between two pulpits", that of Rome and that of Geneva where Jean Calvin would settle permanently in 1541, and, more generally, between Catholicism and Protestantism.

On his advice, measures quite similar to some aspects of the Protestant Reformation were introduced, such as preaching in vernacular rather than Latin, but without formally breaking away from Catholicism.

[1] In much the same spirit, and to establish a reference for the priests of the kingdom of Navarre, he wrote the Familiar Exposition of the Creed, of the Law and of the Sunday Prayer (Familière exposition du symbole, de la loi et de l'oraison dominicale) in which he explained these fundamental texts in a light that could be seen as Protestant, especially close to the idea of justification by faith;[1] it should however be noted that this trend of interpretation existed within Christianity before the Protestant Reformation, and was still held by some Catholic bishops and theologians.

However, such a stance was by now suspect at best, and in 1550 the Sorbonne, at that time Paris' university of theology and a major orthodoxy watchdog in the kingdom of France, condemned Roussel's work as "pernicious for Christiendom [...] reeking of heresy and in part obviously heretic".