page_title: Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
section_title: Lamennais, Montalembert, L'Avenir and liberal Catholicism
hierarchical_section_title: Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire / Lamennais, Montalembert, L'Avenir and liberal Catholicism
context_page_description: Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, often styled Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, was a French ecclesiastic, preacher, journalist, theologian and political activist. He re-established the Dominican Order in post-Revolutionary France. Lacordaire was reputed to be the greatest pulpit orator of the nineteenth century.
context_section_description: 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 visited Father Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais. Lacordaire had long resisted the views of Father Lamennais, one of the leading intellectuals concerned with French Catholic youth, but in May 1830, Lamennais converted him to his liberal version of ultramontanism, that is, the adherence to the absolute universal authority of the papacy in opposition to nationalist and secularist ideas.
  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. They demanded the integral application of the Charter of 1830 and voiced support of foreign liberal revolutions in Poland, Belgium and Italy. Together they launched the newspaper L'Ami de l'Ordre (precursor of today's L'Avenir) on 16 October 1830, whose motto was "Dieu et la Liberté!" ("God and Freedom!"). In that largely anti-clerical and revolutionary context, the journal sought to synthesize ultramontanism and liberalism to reconcile democratic aspirations and Roman Catholicism.
  On 7 December 1830, the editors of "L’Avenir" articulated their demands as follows:
  We firstly ask for the freedom of conscience or the freedom of full universal religion, without distinction as without privilege; and by consequence, in what touches us Catholics, for the total separation of church and state... this necessary separation, without which there would exist for Catholics no religious freedom, implies, for a part, the suppression of the ecclesiastical budget, and we have fully recognized this; for another part, the absolute independence of the clergy in the spiritual order... Just as there can be nothing religious today in politics there must be nothing political in religion.
  Their other demands included freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the extension of electoral suffrage.
  They further endorsed freedom of education. Lacordaire believed that state control of education compromised religious instruction, especially in colleges, and that most students lost their faith upon leaving school. He was against the government's monopoly of the universities, and opposed Montalivet, the minister of public education and faith. On 9 May 1831 Lacordaire and Montalembert opened a free school, rue des Beaux-Arts, which was shut down by the police two days later. 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.
  He was especially vehement in demanding the separation of Church and State. 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. The virulence of "L’Avenir," and particularly of Lamennais and Lacordaire, provoked the French Bishops to form a tribunal against the editors of the periodical. Lamennais and Lacordaire spent January 1831 before the court, and obtained a triumphal acquittal.
  The editors of "L’Avenir" founded in December 1830 the General Society for the defense of religious freedom. "L’Avenir" was suspended by its founders on 15 November 1831 while Lacordaire, Lamennais and Montalembert, the "Pilgrims of Freedom," went to Rome to seek recourse to P
caption: Charles Forbes René de Montalembert
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