Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire was born on 12 May 1802 in Recey-sur-Ource, France. He was a French citizen who worked and wrote in the French language throughout his life.
Lacordaire trained at Saint-Sulpice Seminary, a formation that shaped the several vocations he would go on to pursue. He worked as a Catholic theologian and as a friar, and those religious commitments ran alongside a range of other roles he took on during his adult life.
His career brought together occupations that cut across different spheres of public life. He worked as a preacher, a journalist, a writer, and a politician, moving between the pulpit, the press, and the political arena. These roles overlapped rather than following one another in neat sequence, and together they defined how he engaged with the world around him.
Lacordaire died on 21 November 1861 in Sorèze.
Quotes by Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
The intercourse between man and God reposes upon truths of another order than that of reason, upon a light different and more elevated than that which naturally enlightens created intelligences.
The mind sees, the will commands, the man acts. What is it then to act? To act is to produce something. If you have produced nothing – if no result has been the fruit of your will, you have done nothing.
As to the lawful pleasures of the mind, the heart, or the senses, indulge in them with gratitude and moderation, drawing up sometimes in order to punish yourself, without waiting to be forced to do so by necessity.
Wherever God is adored, he is adored in virtue of a supernatural doctrine; wherever he is despised, he is despised in the name of nature and reason.
For Christians, the first of books is the Gospel and the Rosary is actually the abridgement of the Gospel.
Prophecy, that universal and perpetual torch by which faith is enlightened.