Père Hyacinthe

Charles Jean Marie Loyson (10 March 1827 – 9 February 1912), better known by his religious name Père Hyacinthe, was a famous French preacher and theologian. He was a Roman Catholic priest who had been a Sulpician and a Dominican novice before becoming a Discalced Carmelite and provincial of his order, but left the Roman Catholic Church, in 1869, after major excommunication was pronounced against him. He was known especially for his eloquent sermons at Notre Dame de Paris and sought to reconcile Catholicism with modern ideas.

Loyson was born in Orléans, France, on 10 March 1827. He was baptised Charles Jean Marie; named after the poet Charles Loyson, his uncle. He was educated in Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques by private professors where his father was Rector of the University. His mother was of the noble Burnier-Fontonel family of the Chateau de Reiquier, Savoy. One brother, Jules Theodore Loyson, became a priest and professor at the Collège de Sorbonne in Paris, and one sister became a nun.

In 1845 entered the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, Paris and was ordained four years later. He successively taught philosophy at the seminary in Avignon, and theology at the seminary in Nantes and officiated in his ecclesiastical capacity at Saint-Sulpice. He eventually resigned his post to assume the vows of a friar of the Order of the Carmelites, taking the religious name of Hyacinthe. He then spent two years in the Carmelite convent in Lyon, and attracted much attention by his preaching at the Lycée in Lyons. As a preacher in Lyon and Bordeaux, Loyson acquired his reputation as the most effective pulpit orator of his day; and his success soon afterwards induced him to seek the more critical audiences of Paris, where Loyson further established his fame at the Église de la Madeleine and Notre Dame de Paris. Mullinger wrote that Loyson's "resonant voice and impassioned rhetoric possess, especially for his own countrymen, a powerful charm." His eloquence drew all Paris to his Advent sermons in Notre Dame de Paris between 1865 and 1869, but his orthodoxy fell under suspicion. In 1868, he was summoned to Rome and was ordered to stop preaching on any controversial subject, and to confine himself exclusively to those subjects upon which all Roman Catholics were united in belief.

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