LAUNOY, JEAN de. — Gallican theologian, born at Valdecic (Picardy) on 21 December 1603, died in Paris on 10 March 1678. In 1636 he obtained his doctorate in Paris and was ordained a priest. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was deprived of his chair for criticizing the condemnation of A. Arnauld. Held in high esteem for his extraordinary activity, in questions of faith his anti-traditionalist tendency confined him to the margins of orthodoxy.
About eighty are his works, of which some thirty were placed on the Index. Granet edited his complete works (10 vols., Geneva 1731–33). L. was an opponent of papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption of the Virgin. With regard to Penance, he was a contritionist, and in the famous treatise: Regia in matrimonium potestas (Paris 1674), he regarded Christian marriage as a purely civil contract, subject by its own right solely to the authority of the State, going so far as to maintain that by « Ecclesia », the Council of Trent (sess. XXIV, can. 4) meant secular princes. As for Grace and Predestination, he accused s. Agostino of novelty and opposition to the other Fathers. He attacked the primitive Christian traditions of France (the arrival of S. Lazzaro in Provence, the evangelization of Paris by s. Dionigi Aeropagita) and the ancient monastic privileges (the Carmelite scapular). In this field his conclusions agree with those of modern critics, which explains the revival of interest in his name at the beginning of the twentieth century.