Launoy, Jean de

LAUNOY, JEAN de. - Gallican theologian, b. at Valdecic (Picardy) on 21 Dec. 1603, d. at Paris on 10 March 1678. In 1636 in Paris he took his degree and was ordained a priest. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was deprived of his chair for criticisms of the condemnation of A. Arnauld. Highly esteemed for his extraordinary activity, in the question of faith his anti-traditionalist tendency confined him to the margins of orthodoxy.

His works number about 80, some thirty of which are in the Index. Granet edited the complete edition of them (10 vols., Geneva 1731-33). L. is an opponent of papal infallibility, of the Immaculate Conception and of the Assumption of the Virgin. With regard to Penance he is a contritionist, and in the famous treatise: Regia in matrimonium potestas (Paris 1674), he considers Christian marriage a purely civil contract, subject by its own proper law only 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 accuses St. Augustine of novelty and of opposition to the other Fathers. He attacked the primitive Christian traditions of France (the coming of St. Lazarus into Provence, the evangelization of Paris by St. Dionysius the Areopagite) and the ancient monastic privileges (the scapular of Carmel). In this field his conclusions agree with those of modern critics, which explains the appeal to his name at the beginning of the 20th century.

Vito Zollini