Sibour, Dominique-Auguste-Marie

SIBOUR, DOMINIQUE-AUGUSTE-MARIE. - Archbishop of Paris, b. 4 April 1792 at St-Paul-Trois-Châteaux (Drôme), d. 3 Jan. 1857 in Paris.

Ordained priest in 1818, he taught at the Seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris and was attached to the parish of St. Sulpice. A canon of the Cathedral at Nîmes in 1822, he acquired a reputation as a good preacher. Bishop of Digne in 1839, he took an active part with his writings in the struggle undertaken by French Catholics for freedom of teaching. He acquired particular fame 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 and of those protecting the clergy in the government of dioceses. On the death of Msgr. 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 its provisions, convinced that it was far more opportune to lend oneself to a compromise in the matter of teaching than to insist on sterile criticisms and risk that public education, left completely in lay hands, would take on an anticatholic tone. The attitude of the archbishop and of many other bishops nevertheless proved unwelcome to part of the French episcopate, of which L. Veuillot's Univers was the eloquent and able spokesman. Between the latter and the archbishop relations soon became very tense. In 1852 came the rupture. Abbot Gaduel, vicar general of Msgr. Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, having branded as heretical the Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo of Donoso Cortés, was violently attacked by Veuillot and accused of making himself the spokesman of Gallican tendencies. To put an end to the controversies and to the interference of laymen in the internal life of the Church, S. by an ordinance forbade the reading of the Univers to all religious. The prohibition was later lifted through the intervention of Pius IX, who desired a real pacification with Veuillot without resorting to extreme measures. A supporter of Bonaparte, S. approved the coup d'état of 2 Dec. 1851 and, called to the Senate in March 1852, voted in favor of the restoration of the Empire. His tendency toward the ralliement with the government authorities was interpreted by ultramontane circles as an adherence to Gallican ideas, and the complexity of the points in dispute between the two sides, into which the episcopate and the French Catholic world were then divided, made his task very 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, one Verger, while, vested in sacred paramentals, he was beginning the novena of St. Genevieve at St-Etienne de Mont.

Silvio Furlani