SIBOUR, DOMINIQUE-AUGUSTE-MARIE. — Archbishop of Paris, b. 4 April 1792 at St-Paul-Trois-Châteaux (Drôme), d. 3 January 1857 in Paris.
Ordained a priest in 1818, he taught at the Seminary of S. Nicola du Chardonnet in Paris and was attached to the parish of S. Sulpizio. Canon of the Cathedral at Nîmes in 1822, he acquired a reputation as a good preacher. Bishop of Digne in 1839, he actively participated through his writings in the struggle undertaken by French Catholics for freedom of education. He acquired particular renown with the Institutions diocésaines, published in 1845, in which he demanded the independence of the Church, the freedom of councils, and the restoration of the ancient disciplinary institutions protecting the clergy in the governance of dioceses. Upon the death of Mgr. Affre, he was appointed archbishop of Paris (1848). The controversies raised by the Falloux Law found the archbishop among those who approved its spirit and provisions, convinced that it was much more appropriate to accept a compromise in educational matters than to persist in sterile criticism and risk public education, left entirely in lay hands, taking on an anti-Catholic character. The attitude of the archbishop and many other bishops nevertheless displeased part of the French episcopate, whose eloquent and skilful spokesman was the Univers of L. Veuillot. Relations between the latter and the archbishop soon became extremely tense. In 1852 the break occurred. Abbé Gaduel, vicar general of Mgr. Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, having branded Donoso Cortés’s Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo as heretical, was violently attacked by Veuillot and accused of acting as spokesman for Gallican tendencies. To put an end to the controversies and to lay interference in the internal life of the Church, S. issued an ordinance prohibiting all religious from reading the Univers. The prohibition was subsequently lifted through the intervention of Pius IX, who desired genuine reconciliation with Veuillot without resorting to extreme measures. A supporter of Bonaparte, S. approved the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 and, appointed to the Senate in March 1852, voted in favour of the restoration of the Empire. His inclination toward rapprochement with the governmental authorities was interpreted by ultramontane circles as adherence to Gallican ideas, and the complexity of the disputed issues between the two sides, which at that time divided the episcopate and the French Catholic world, made his task extremely difficult. Having gone to Rome in 1854 for the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he died three years later, stabbed by an excommunicated priest, a certain Verger, while, dressed in sacred vestments, he was beginning the novena of s. Genoveffa at St-Etienne de Mont.