Marie-Dominique Chenu

Marie-Dominique Chenu OP (7 January 1895, Soisy-sur-Seine, Essonne – 11 February 1990, Paris) was a progressive Roman Catholic theologian and one of the founders of the reformist journal Concilium.

Chenu was born on 7 January 1895 at Soisy-sur-Seine, Essonne, and grew up under the name Marcel-Leon. His parents were bakers near Corbeil.

Chenu entered the French Province of the Dominican Order in 1913, taking the name Marie-Dominique and studying at Le Saulchoir, which at the time was located (as a result of the French anti-Church laws of 1905-6) at Kain in Belgium. With the outbreak of World War I and the suspension of teaching at Le Saulchoir, Chenu travelled to Rome in 1914 to study at the Pontificium Collegium Internationale Angelicum, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum. While at the Angelicum, Chenu was ordained in 1919 and completed his doctorate in theology in 1920 under the direction of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange with a dissertation entitled De contemplatione, which studied the meaning of contemplation in Thomas Aquinas.

In 1920 Chenu was appointed Professor of the History of Dogma at Le Saulchoir (and in late 1921 turned down a request from his doctoral supervisor Garrigou-Lagrange's to return to the Angelicum as a lecturer). He began to develop his theological perspective replacing the non-historical approach to Thomism that he had learned from Garrigou-Lagrange at the Angelicum with an historicist reading of Aquinas. At Le Saulchoir he was the teacher of Dominicans Yves Congar and Edward Schillebeeckx.

In 1930 Chenu founded the Institut d'Etudes Médiévales de Montréal.

Chenu served as regent of studies at Le Saulchoir from 1932 to 1942, and was therefore very involved in the move of Le Saulchoir from Belgium to Étoilles, near Paris, in 1937.

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