Styles of Achille Liénart |
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Reference style | His Eminence |
Spoken style | Your Eminence |
Informal style | Cardinal |
See | Lille (emeritus) |
Achille Liénart (February 7, 1884—February 15, 1973) was a French Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Bishop of Lille from 1928 to 1968, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1930.
Born in Lille to a bourgeoisie family of cloth merchants, Liénart was the second of the four children of Achille Philippe Hyacinthe Liénart and Louise Delesalle. He studied at College Saint-Joseph, the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, the Institut Catholique de Paris, Collège de Sorbonne, and the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He was ordained to the priesthood on June 29, 1907, and then taught at the Seminary of Cambrai until 1910, and then at Lille until 1914. During World War I Liénart served as a chaplain to the French Army, and did pastoral work in his hometown from 1919 to 1928. As a priest, he championed social reform, trade unionism, and the Worker Priest movement[1].
On October 6, 1928, he was appointed Bishop of Lille by Pope Pius XI. Liénart received his episcopal consecration on the following December 8 from Bishop Charles-Albert-Joseph Lecomte of Amiens, with Bishops Palmyre Jasoone and Maurice Feltin serving as co-consecrators, in Tourcoing. He was created Cardinal Priest of S. Sisto by Pius XI in the consistory of June 30, 1930. By coincidence, one of the first priests he ordained, on September 21, 1929 was a certain Marcel Lefebvre,[2]. Liénart's and Lefebvre's paths would be interwined during the following years, and it was Liénart who, as Cardinal, in 1947 would consecrate Lefebvre (who had been appointed as Vicar Apostolic of Dakar in Senegal), to the Episcopate.
During the German occupation, Liénart initially supported Philippe Pétain, but was greatly opposed to Nazi Germany[3].
Liénart, who participated in the 1939 papal conclave, was elected President of the French Episcopal Conference in 1948, representing the Catholic Church in France, and remained in that post until 1964. An elector in the 1958 papal conclave, he was named the first Territorial Prelate of Mission de France on November 13, 1954, and later resigned from this post in 1964.
An active participant of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Liénart was a leading liberal voice at the Council and sat on its Board of Presidency. When the Roman Curia, composed predominantly of conservative prelates, issued a list of nominees for the members of the Council's commissions, Liénart objected that nothing of the nominees' qualifications were included[4][5]. Liénart, assisted by Cardinals Bernardus Johannes Alfrink and Giovanni Colombo, delivered one of the closing messages of the Council on December 8, 1965[6]. He was also one of the cardinal electors in the 1963 papal conclave, which selected Pope Paul VI.
Liénart resigned as Lille's bishop on March 14, 1968, after forty years of service. After his death at age 89, he was buried in the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille.
Catholic Church titles | ||
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Preceded by Hector-Raphaël Quilliet |
Bishop of Lille 1928–1968 |
Succeeded by Adrien-Edmond-Maurice Gand |
Preceded by Emmanuel Célestin Suhard |
President of the French Episcopal Conference 1948–1964 |
Succeeded by François Marty |