“The Church is intolerant in principle because she believes; she is tolerant in practice because she loves. The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe; they are intolerant in practice because they do not love.”
— Jmy (@JmyLss) October 1, 2026
Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange pic.twitter.com/lKyLINQ0yH
Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, 1877-1964.
His influence.
L'Osservatore Romano of 9–10 December 1950 lists Garrigou-Lagrange among the names of the preparatory commission for the definition of the Assumption of Mary.[15]
Garrigou-Lagrange taught many Catholic theologians during his academic career at the Angelicum. He also supervised the doctoral research of Marie-Dominique Chenu, who was ordained in 1919 and completed his doctorate in theology in 1920 with a dissertation entitled De contemplatione.[16] In the period between World War II and the Cold War Garrigou-Lagrange was the "torchbearer of orthodox Thomism" against Modernism.[17] In 1926 he served as the definitive consulter to Pope Pius XI in declaring John of the Cross a doctor of the church.[18]
He is commonly held to have influenced the decision in 1942 to place the privately circulated book Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir (Étiolles 1937) by Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., on the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum as the culmination of a polemic within the Dominican Order between the Angelicum supporters of speculative scholasticism and the French revival Thomists who were more attentive to historical hermeneutics.[19]
Garrigou-Lagrange gave the retreat in Paris which attracted Yves Congar to leave the diocesan seminary in order to join the Dominicans.[20] Later, Congar's methodology was suspected of Modernism because it seemed to derive more from religious experience than from syllogistic analysis.[21]
