REGINALD GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, PRIEST AND WRITER

REGINALD GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, PRIEST AND WRITER - 15 FEBRUARY

REGINALD GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, PRIEST AND WRITER

On February 21, 1877, the priest and influential writer Reginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange OP was born in Auch, near Toulouse, France, the son of a Catholic civil servant. In 1896, he enrolled at the University of Bordeaux. While studying medicine at Bordeaux, he experienced a religious conversion after reading Life, Science, and Art by Ernest Hello (1828-85). He explained it thus:

I was able to glimpse how the doctrine of the Catholic Church is the absolute Truth concerning God and his intimate life and concerning the human person, his origin and his supernatural destiny. I saw in a wink of an eye that it was not a truth relative to our time and place but an absolute truth that will not change but will become more and more apparent up to the time when we see God face to face. A ray of light shone before my eyes and made clear the words of the Lord: 'The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.' I understood that this truth must bear fruit like the grain of wheat in good soil...

He then joined Dominican Order at Amiens in the autumn of 1897. After he finished his novitiate he went to the studium in Flavigny for his philosophical and theological studies to prepare for the priesthood and was ordained a priest on September 28, 1902.

In 1906, Fr Garrigou was called to ascend to the chair of dogmatic theology at Le Saulchoir. This change was a decisive moment in Fr Garrigou's life which would allow him to devote himself to the study of philosophy which he would relish. As a subsequent result of this change, Fr Garrigou studied the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Thomists in their intricacies and subsequently published a vast amount of momentous works - altogether wrote 28 books and over 600 articles - including Thomist theological treatises, for example, The Priest in Union with Christ, Life Everlasting and Mother of our Saviour and Our Interior Life. He also wrote commentaries on Aquinas’ Summa Theologica like The One God, The Trinity and God the Creator, Beatitude, Grace, and Christ the Saviour. Another very famous work of his is The Three Ages of the Interior Life.

In 1909, Master General Cormier recognised his abilities and assigned him to the Angelicum where he continued teaching dogmatic theology until his retirement in 1959. In 1917 a special professorship in ascetical and mystical theology was created for him at the Angelicum - the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

As Fr Garrigou became frail, he was moved to the priory of Santa Sabina in Rome. He went to his eternal reward on February 15, 1964.

Sources:

http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/thomas-crean/saint-in-heaven.htm -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9ginald_Garrigou-Lagrange -

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/rev-reginald-garrigoulagrange-op-9949 -https://onepeterfive.com/a-theologian-for-our-times-rediscovering-fr-garrigou-lagrange/

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