Jean Daniélou


Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou was a French member of the Jesuit order and a Roman Catholic cardinal. He was also a theologian and historian and a member of the Académie française.

Biography

Early life and studies

Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou was born on 14 May 1905 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was the son of Charles Daniélou and Madeleine Clamorgan. His father was an anticlerical politician who served in the French government several times as a minister, while his mother was an educator and the founder of institutions for women's education. His brother Alain was a noted Indologist and a renowned historian.
Daniélou studied at La Sorbonne and passed his agrégation in grammar in 1927. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1929 and during his regency taught at a boys' school in Poitiers, from 1934 to 1936. He then studied theology at Fourvière in Lyon under Henri de Lubac, who introduced him to patristics and the Fathers of the Church. He was ordained a priest on 20 August 1938.

Priesthood, episcopate and cardinalate

During World War II, Daniélou served with the Air Force in 1939-1940. With the fall of France to Nazi Germany he was returned to civilian life and entered doctoral studies, completing in 1942 his thesis on the spiritual doctrine of St. Gregory of Nyssa. He was then appointed chaplain to the female section of the École Normale Supérieure, at Sèvres. He spent most of his time on research in patristics, and became one of the founders of the Sources Chrétiennes collection. In 1944 he was named Professor of Early Christian History at the Institut Catholique de Paris, later becoming dean there. Beginning in the 1950s he produced several historical studies which included The Bible and the Liturgy, The Lord of History, and that furnished background for the development of Covenantal Theology.
Thoroughly grounded in the Fathers of the church, who worked from Scripture, Daniélou generally avoided the neo-Thomistic terminology and approach and used a more relational vocabulary, emphasizing our self-gift in response to God's gift in Jesus Christ, with the gradual unveiling of the Trinitarian life in history.
Pope John XXIII appointed Daniélou a peritus for the Second Vatican Council. In 1969 Pope Paul VI made him a cardinal, with the episcopal titular see of Taormina, and Cardinal-Deacon of San Saba. Similar to his theology professor Henri de Lubac he twice refused the cardinalate but accepted on the insistence of Paul VI. He was elected to the Académie française on 9 November 1972, to succeed Cardinal Eugène Tisserant.

Death and legacy

He died unexpectedly in 1974 in the home of a woman who was alleged to be a prostitute. The Society of Jesus, after an investigation, determined that Daniélou was bringing money to pay for the bail of the woman's husband. His brother defended him strongly, pointing out that he had always gone out of his way to serve those in most need.