SERRY, JACQUES-HYACINTHE. - Dominican theologian and polemicist, b. at Toulon in 1658, d. at Padua on 12 March 1738.
He entered the Order at Marseilles (c. 1673), where his uncle, the Dominican Tommaso S., was stationed. He completed his studies in Paris and taught there. Called to Rome in 1690, he was theologian to Cardinals de Boullon and Altieri, and consultor of the Holy Office. On 23 March 1697 he became a doctor of the Sorbonne and, in September of the same year, assumed the chair of theology at the University of Padua, which he held until his death, declining that of Casanatense theologian (1700–1702).
A prolific and combative writer, he is known especially for the Historia Congregationum de Auxiliis Divinae Oratiae (Louvain, 1700; definitive ed., Antwerp, 1709), published under the pseudonym A. Le Blanc, and for the controversies that preceded and followed it, through which the disputes of a hundred years earlier seemed to revive. Although a moderate Gallican (he had been a disciple of N. Alexandre), S. was unjustly accused of Calvinism, and it was asserted that his Historia had been condemned. Other works include: Exercitationes historicae, criticae, polemicae de Christo, eiusque Matre (Venice, 1719); Praelectiones theologicae-dogmaticae, polemicae-scholasticae... (5 vols., ibid., 1742). In 1770 an edition in 6 vols. of the Opera omnia was also published in Venice.