FÉLIX, CÉLESTIN-JOSEPH. - Jesuit, lecturer, b. at Neuville-sur-l'Escaut (diocese of Cambrai) on 28 June 1810, d. at Lille on 6 July 1891. After four years of teaching at Brugelette, he moved as a preacher to Paris (1851), and in 1853 he was called by Archbishop A. Sibour to succeed Fathers E. D. Lacordaire and S. de Ravignan in the pulpit of Notre-Dame. He remained there until 1870, acquiring the reputation of one of the most brilliant orators, and there he closed the long series of his conferences with a sermon bold and courageous for those times, on the infallibility of the pope. From 1867 to 1883 he was superior at Nancy; from 1883 to 1885 at Lille, where he remained until his death, going from time to time to preach in the principal cathedrals of France and Belgium.
His name is linked above all to the conferences of Notre-Dame. After having preached for three years on disparate subjects (Grandes erreurs du siècle [1853]; Le christianisme est charité [1854]; Le sacrifice [1855]), he began in 1856 the series Le progrès par le christianisme (15 vols., Paris 1856-70), in which true and genuine progress under all its forms — individual, familial, artistic, moral, social — is treated with breadth of vision joined to a great exactness of doctrine. Each year, moreover, he summarized the practical conclusions deriving from his conferences in the discourses of the Easter retreat (7 vols., ibid. 1867-71). Conferences and retreats had numerous editions and versions, and even today they preserve unchanged their profound efficacy.
His eloquence is distinguished by clarity, vigorous logic, vibrant enthusiasm that moves and stirs, sureness of doctrine, and the art of a skillful and subtle dialectic.