Within the church he came to prominence as a controversialist, notably on account of his long-standing record of theological and very public feuding with Félix Orsières to whose polemical Liberal Catholicism Gérard, alongside his colleagues within the Aosta cathedral establishment, he was strongly opposed.
[6] During his time at La Salle, on 4 July 1845 he was recruited as a member of the chapter at the cathedral in Aosta, some 20 km / 12 miles down the valley, undertaking both jobs simultaneously.
[9] The catholic conservative "Indépendant" was launched on 1 March 1849, in part as a reaction to the more liberal tone being adopted by the existing mainstream regional media: Gérard he was one of those who switched from the Feuille d'Annonces, becoming instead a regular contributing editor to the new newspaper for the four years until 1853 when its "radical anticlericalism" led to its cessation.
[5] This, along with aspects of his own views and temperament, set up a long-standing and increasingly intense hostile relations between Gérard and the progressive Canon Orsières[10] with whom he had worked on the "Feuille d'Annonces d'Aoste".
The dispute came to an end only in 1855, when Orsières, threatened with excommunication, was persuaded to sign a retraction and agree to submit to the "holy congregation" - in effect a quasi-judicial tribunal of priests set up by the bishop, which had robustly rejected Orsières' position on a series of social and ecclesiastical matters on which Bishop Jourdain followed the robustly traditionalist views of the church under the leadership of the recently elected Pope Pius IX.
[5] Old-fashioned or not, according to the Val d'Aoste scholar Abbé Henry, the surviving published legacy of Léon-Clément Gérard comprises more than 50,000 verses, which together constitute an important element in the Valdôtain literary heritage.