Jean-Joseph Gaume

Jean-Joseph Gaume (5 May 1802 – 19 November 1879) was a French Roman Catholic theologian and author.

Gaume was born at Fuans, Franche-Comté. While attached to the Diocese of Nevers, he was successively professor of theology, director of the petit séminaire, canon, and vicar-general of the diocese, and had already published several works, when he left for Rome in 1841.

Pope Gregory XVI made him a knight of the Reformed Order of St. Sylvester. A doctor of theology of the University of Prague, a member of several societies of scholars, honorary vicar-general of several dioceses, he received from Pope Pius IX in 1854 the title of prothonotary apostolic.

Gaume wrote numerous books treating of theology, history, and education. Those of the third gave rise to a debate the classics. The author blamed the Renaissance, as a resurrection of the paganism of antiquity, as the primal source of all the evil of his days. Such is the dominating idea of the works "Les Trois Rome" (1847), "Histoire de la societé domestique" (2 vols., 1854) and "La Révolution" (8 vols., 1856).

As a cure, it was necessary to devise a new method of moulding childhood and youth; this was to consist in catechetical instruction and the exclusion of pagan authors from classical studies. In support of this method he wrote "Catéchisme de Persévérance, ou Exposé de la Religion depuis l'origine du monde jusqu'à nos jours" (8 vols., 1854); "La Religion et l'Eternité" (1859); "Traité de l'Esprit Saint (1864). To this series of works belong his "Manuel du Confesseur" (1*54) and "l'Horloge de la Passion" (1857), which he translated from St. Alphonsus Liguori.

The reform, or rather the revolution—the word is his—which he deemed necessary in classic instruction he had indicated as early as 1835 in his book "Le Catholicisme dans l'éducation", without arousing much comment. He returned to the subject in 1851 in a work entitled "Le Ver rongeur des sociétés modernes ou le Paganisme dans l'Education". The patronage of two influential prelates—Mgr. Gousset, Archbishop of Reims, and Pierre Louis Parisis, Bishop of Arras—and above all the articles of Louis Veuillot in "L'Univers", which supported Gaume from the first, gained for his views a hearing which they had previously failed to secure, and provoked a lively controversy among Catholics.

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