CONDREN, CHARLES de. — Second superior general of the French Oratory, one of the most distinguished spiritual directors of the period, born at Vaubuin (Soissons) on 15 December 1588, died in Paris on 7 January 1641. Ordained a priest in 1614, he obtained his doctorate at the Sorbonne the following year and preached at St-Nicolas du Chardonnet, St-Honoré, and St-Médard. After hesitating for some time over his vocation, he entered the Oratory at the age of twenty-nine. Soon afterward Cardinal de Bérulle entrusted him with important missions to Langres and Poitiers, and proposed him to the queen as confessor to the brother of Louis XIII, Gaston d’Orléans.
In 1624, elected superior at St-Magloire, he stood out among the most eminent Parisian mystics of the time. Five years later he succeeded de Bérulle as the second superior general of the Oratory. A co-founder of the « Compagnie du St. Sacrement », he tirelessly promoted the Catholic restoration in France.
His body, discovered in 1884, is preserved in the col-
lege of Juilly.
All his works are posthumous: Lettres et Discours
(1642, 1647, 1655, 1658, 1668) and, above all, the pamphlet
L'idée du sacerdoce et du sacrifice de Jésus Christ, frequently
reprinted, not entirely his own, but perfectly con-
sonant with the principles of his direction. The doctrine of C.
is identical with that of de Bérulle, apart from certain nuances;
both may be summed up in « theocentrism », in oppo-
sition to « anthropocentrism ». Whereas de Bérulle teaches
our union with God as deriving from the appropria-
tion by the God-Man of our interior states, C. exalts
adherence to the annihilation of the God-Man, who anni-
hilates and consumes us in the sacrifice of the Incarnation and
of Calvary.
C. exerted a broad influence on his contemporaries.
Fr. Amelote, his biographer, writes: « cet homme était
trop du ciel pour être découvert en la terre ». St Vincent
de Paul often repeated that no man like him had ever been
seen, and M. Olier regarded him as « the greatest
light of our century and perhaps of many others ».