Guérard des Lauriers

Michel Louis Guérard des Lauriers, O.P. (1898 – 27 February 1988) was a Dominican theologian and, in later life, a traditionalist Catholic bishop.

A normalien and agrégé in mathematics, Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers entered the Dominican novitiate of Amiens in 1927 and was ordained a priest on 29 July 1931.

He became a professor of philosophy at the famous, clerical Dominican university of Le Saulchoir in Belgium in 1933. Under Pope Pius XII (1939–1958), Fr. Guérard des Lauriers served as a professor at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. Guérard des Lauriers, O.P., was an advisor to the Pope on the dogma of the Assumption of Mary (proclaimed in Munificentissimus Deus) before 1950. From 1954 until 1955 he served as personal Father Confessor to Pius XII, before being replaced by Fr. Augustin Bea, S.J.

With the advent of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Guérard des Lauriers became concerned with the events taking place in the Church. In 1969 he co-authored the Ottaviani Intervention which was a critical study of the new Mass. In 1970 Pope Paul VI made public a document demanding the resignation of certain conservative professors at the pontifical universities of Rome, among them Guérard des Lauriers.

Guérard des Lauriers then became a lecturer and professor at Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's St. Pius X seminary in Écône, Switzerland. He then presented his thesis that the Chair of Peter might be vacant because Pope Paul VI was guilty of heresy (see sedevacantism and sedeprivationism). Because of this view, Lefebvre removed Guérard des Lauriers from his seminary teaching post in 1977.