Ferdinand François Châtel

Ferdinand François Châtel

Ferdinand Toussaint François Châtel (born January 9, 1795 in Gannat , Département Allier ; † January 13, 1875 ) was the "Bishop-Primate of Gaul" of the Église Catholique Française .

Life

The son of François Châtel and his wife Marie Monnier was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1815 . In the 1820s he worked in Paris , where he made a name for himself as a preacher with Gallican and liberal views. From 1830 he formed a special church group with like-minded priests, which from 1831 called itself Église Catholique Française , and was therefore suspended from his Roman Catholic priesthood. How he obtained the episcopal ordination in 1831 is controversial. The following are named as ordinators: Th. J. Poulard, constitutional bishop of Saône-et-Loire, Jean Machaut (1770–1845), himself consecrated by Guillaume Mauviel , constitutional bishop of Cayes (Haiti), and the "Templar Bishop" Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat.

Growing economic difficulties and opposition to the government led in 1842 to the confiscation of all places of worship and the ban on church fellowship. Châtel temporarily fled to Belgium . In the course of the revolution of 1848 he reopened his church in Paris, but had to close it definitively with the victory of the reaction in 1849. In 1850 he was sentenced to one year in prison. When he regained freedom, his church had dispersed. He and his wife spent the last years of his life in poverty. His grave is in the Clichy cemetery.

Châtel is considered the forerunner of church leaders such as Hyacinthe Loyson and Joseph René Vilatte .

literature

• Iorwerth Prothero: Religion and Radicalism in July Monarchy France. The French Church of the Abbé Chatel. The Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter 2005, ISBN 0-7734-6221-X .
• Georges Rougeron: L'abbé FF Châtel, eresiarca del XIX secolo e fondatore della "Chiesa cattolica francese" . In: La Rivista Dolciniana 8 (1996) 29-37.

Web links

• History of the Église Catholique Française (French)