Achille Liénart

Styles of Achille Liénart
Reference style	His Eminence
Spoken style	Your Eminence
Informal style	Cardinal
See	Lille (emeritus)

Achille Liénart (7 February 1884—15 February 1973) was a French Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Bishop of Lille from 1928 to 1968, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1930.

Born in Lille to a bourgeoisie family of cloth merchants, Liénart was the second of the four children of Achille Philippe Hyacinthe Liénart and Louise Delesalle. He studied at College Saint-Joseph, the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, the Institut Catholique de Paris, Collège de Sorbonne, and the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He was ordained to the priesthood on 29 June 1907, and then taught at the Seminary of Cambrai until 1910, and then at Lille until 1914. During World War I Liénart served as a chaplain to the French Army, and did pastoral work in his hometown from 1919 to 1928. As a priest, he championed social reform, trade unionism, and the Worker Priest movement.

On 6 October 1928 he was appointed Bishop of Lille by Pope Pius XI. Liénart received his episcopal consecration on the following December 8 from Bishop Charles-Albert-Joseph Lecomte of Amiens, with Bishops Palmyre Jasoone and Maurice Feltin serving as co-consecrators, in Tourcoing. He was created Cardinal Priest of S. Sisto by Pius XI in the consistory of 30 June 1930. By coincidence, one of the first priests he ordained, on 21 September 1929, was a certain Marcel Lefebvre. Liénart's and Lefebvre's paths would be interwined during the following years, even serving both on the Central Preparatory Commission for the Second Vatican Council. And it was Liénart who, as Cardinal, in 1947 would consecrate Lefebvre (who had been appointed as Apostolic Vicar of Dakar in Senegal), to the Episcopate.

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