Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

The son of a doctor in the French navy, Henri Lacordaire was born on 12 May 1802 at Recey-sur-Ource (Côte-d'Or) and raised in Dijon by his mother, Anne Dugied, the daughter of a lawyer at the Parliament of Bourgogne who was widowed at an early age, when her husband died in 1806.

Although legally too young to plead cases, he was allowed to do so and he successfully argued several in the Court of Assizes, attracting the interest of the great liberal lawyer Berryer.

Thanks to the support of Monseigneur de Quélen, the Archbishop of Paris, who granted him a scholarship, he began studying at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Issy in 1824 over the objections of his mother and friends.

Shortly after his ordination he was offered the position of auditor of the rota at the court of Rome, an office which at once confers the title of monsignore, and is always a step to the episcopate, and often to a cardinal's hat; but he declined it peremptorily.

Discouraged, when Bishop John Dubois of New York came to Paris to recruit missionaries for the United States, Lacordaire volunteered and was granted permission, but the revolutionary events of 1830 kept him in France.

He, Lamennais, Olympe-Philippe Gerbet, and the young Viscount Charles de Montalembert, who became one of his closest friends, allied themselves with the July Revolution.

In that largely anti-clerical and revolutionary context, the journal sought to synthesize ultramontanism and liberalism to reconcile democratic aspirations and Roman Catholicism.

To this end, he called on French priests to refuse the salary which was paid them by the government, advocating for the embrace of apostolic poverty by the clergy.

On 15 November 1830, he expressed himself: "We are preyed upon by our enemies, by those who regard us as hypocrites or as imbeciles, and by those who are persuaded that our life depends on money... Freedom is not given, it is taken."

These demands, along with numerous attacks against bishops appointed by the new government, whom he characterized as ambitious and servile, provoked a scandal in the French episcopate, which was largely Gallican (i.e., conciliarist, nationalist, royalist, asserting the authority of the local episcopacy, and opposed to papal absolutism) and conservative.

[4] Lacordaire believed that state control of education compromised religious instruction, especially in colleges, and that most students lost their faith upon leaving school.

At a trial which took place in front of the Chambre des Pairs (Chamber of Peers) Lacordaire defended himself, but failed to prevent the permanent closure of the school.

In 1834 he also challenged Lamennais, who rather than accept what he saw as Rome's reactionary absolutism, publicly renounced his priesthood and published "Les Paroles d’un Croyant" (Words of a Believer,) a vociferous republican polemic against the established social order, denouncing what he now saw as the conspiracy of kings and priests against the people.

Most commentators see this episode as effectively squelching of the open expression of modernist ideas in Catholic circles, until at least the papacy of Leo XIII at the end of the century.

Lacordaire, for his part, then further distanced himself from Lammenais, expressed his disappointment at the consequences of the Revolution of 1830, and proclaimed his continued faithfulness to the Church of Rome.

In January 1834, at the encouragement of the young Frédéric Ozanam, the founder the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (a charitable organization,) Father Lacordaire started a series of lectures at the Collège Stanislas.

According to Thomas Bokenkotter, Lacordaire's Notre Dame Conferences, "...proved to be one of the most dramatic events of nineteenth century church history.

"[8] Today the Lacordaire Notre-Dame Lectures, which mixed theology, philosophy and poetry, are still acclaimed as a sublime modern re-invigoration of traditional homiletics.

The encounter with Lacordaire marked a turning point in her life and the beginning of a spiritual journey that would eventually lead her to found the Religious of the Assumption.

There, he published his "Letter on the Holy See" in which he reaffirmed with vigor his ultramontane positions, insisting on the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, "the one and permanent trustee, supreme organ of the Gospel, and the sacred source of the universal communion."

On 9 April 1839, Lacordaire formally joined the Dominicans at the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome and received the name Dominic.

[2] In April 1844 Lacordaire obtained permission to purchase the former Carthusians monastery of Notre-Dame de Châlais and establish a Dominican novitiate.

In 1850, the Dominican Province of France was officially re-established under his direction and he was elected provincial superior, but Pope Pius IX named Alexandre Jandel, a philosophical opponent of Lacordaire, vicar general of the order.

With Frédéric Ozanam and the Abbot Maret, he launched a newspaper, L'Ère Nouvelle (The New Era), to campaign for the rights of Catholics under the new regime.

[citation needed] He found the Falloux Laws a disappointment despite their attempt to establish a degree of freedom for Catholic secondary education.

[13] Encouraged by opponents of the Imperial Regime, supported by Montalembert and Berryer, he agreed that he would not criticize Napoléon III's intervention in Italian politics.

'[15] The later encyclyclical Singulari Nos of 1834 summoned Lamennais and his followers to renounce the radical views he developed against temporal and spiritual sovereignties.