QUÉLEN, HYACINTHE-LOUIS, count of. – French prelate, b. 8 October 1778 in Paris, where he d. 31 December 1839. Of an ancient Breton family and the younger son of J. Claude de Q., he was destined for an ecclesiastical career and ordained a priest in 1807. Titular archbishop of Samosata in 1819, he became coadjutor, with the right of succession, to Cardinal de Talleyrand-Périgord, archbishop of Paris.
He in fact succeeded him on 20 October 1821 and was appointed a peer of France on 31 October 1822. He rose against the principles of Lamennais (v.) in the work Des progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l'Église, with a pastoral letter to the clergy and faithful of his diocese on the occasion of the death of Leo XII, and defined Lamennais, without naming him, as a presumptuous man intent on raising his personal opinions to the status of dogmas; he accused him of professing doctrines that sowed distrust and hatred between so-
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QUEENSTOWN, DIOCESE of – Reopening of the schools: a nun and a missionary attend to cleaning the young pupils – Queenstown.
vereigns and subjects, and were such as to overturn society ab imis. Lamennais seized the opportunity to polemicize against the archbishop in his Première et deuxième lettre à Monseigneur l'archevêque de Paris. Once again, after the encyclical Mirari vos and Lamennais’s retraction on 5 November 1832, the archbishop of Paris found himself face to face with Lamennais in lengthy conversations at the archiepiscopal palace, and Q. endeavored to act as mediator, succeeding in persuading the rebel to submit absolutely and unconditionally. But a few months later Lamennais openly separated himself from the Church. Q. was consistently hostile to the July Revolution and the Orleanist monarchy, perhaps convinced that the new regime would not last beyond l'espace d'un matin. Various sacrilegious demonstrations, among them the particularly serious one of 14–15 February 1831, followed by the looting of the archbishopric itself, strengthened his aversion and hostility toward the new government, so that he was never reconciled with the July monarchy. His remaining in the archbishopric, after Gregory XVI had rejected in 1831 the government’s request for the prelate’s deposition, constituted a difficult obstacle to the normalization and improvement of relations between the Holy See and the France of Louis Philippe. The internuncio Garibaldi strove in vain to persuade the archbishop to recognize the constituted authorities. At most, Q. limited himself to congratulating the sovereign whenever he escaped some assassination attempt.
