Marie-Joseph Lagrange

Marie-Joseph Lagrange

Marie-Joseph Lagrange OP (born March 7, 1855 in Bourg-en-Bresse , † March 10, 1938 in Marseille ; actually Albert Marie-Henri Lagrange ) was a French Dominican and founder of the École biblique in Jerusalem .

Life

Lagrange grew up in a middle-class intellectual environment. His father was already approaching the démocratie chrétienne in an epoch when traditional Catholicism in France was still predominantly opposed to the republic. The efforts of Pope Leo XIII. to come to an understanding (the so-called ralliement ), found little approval in the clergy and the people.

The young Albert Lagrange attended a small seminar since 1868 . In addition to a strong interest in theology and the church, there was also a preference for archeology, geology, history and science in general. While his father would have liked to see him as a notary, a spiritual calling soon emerged.

education

From 1872, initially during his courses at the Saint-Cyr Military School , he met the Dominicans. The father Lagrange urged his son to study law, which Albert graduated with a doctorate in 1878 at the age of 23. He then entered the seminary at Issy-les-Moulineaux .

From 1877 Lagrange completed a personal conversion, as a result of which he began the novitiate with the Dominicans in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in 1879 .

He was ordained a priest in Zamora in 1883 . During his studies he spent a. a. one year in Salamanca to learn Hebrew. He taught church history and philosophy there and in Toulouse from 1884 to 1888. From 1888–90 he also studied extensively ancient languages ​​in Vienna (especially Arabic and ancient Egyptian), a. a. There he got to know the "German" Bible exegesis. In Vienna in 1889 he received an order to travel to Jerusalem.

Fr. Marie-Joseph Lagrange (the name of the order) founded the École biblique et archéologique Française in Jerusalem in 1890 . He had been in contact with the Dominican convent of Saint-Etienne in Jerusalem since 1882 . In 1903 he was appointed consultor to the newly established papal Biblical Commission.

Read the Bible “catholic”

The work of Lagrange led him to the conviction that the Holy Scriptures , especially when they are critically and scientifically processed, reliably express the history of Israel as well as the life and work of Jesus as a whole.

One of the successes of the École biblique is the famous Jerusalem Bible , which has found widespread recognition in the Catholic Church.

With regard to the Gospels, however, the Lagrange School, especially by means of a “ critique de la critique ” (according to Jean Guitton ), tended to confirm a number of main lines of ecclesiastical tradition. Lagrange saw the Holy Land as a “fifth gospel,” even as a gospel that confirms the gospels with historical accuracy, geographically and archaeologically.

According to Lagrange, the Gospels could not be illuminated better than through everyday contact with the places that tell of the events that took place there. Lagrange sought and found almost all of these places during 50 years of intensive research. He succeeded in the verification with such astonishing precision that not only the reports of Matthew (the customs broker Levi and the apostle) and Mark (Petri interpreter), but also of John (Jesus' favorite disciple) and Luke (collaborator of Paul, who traditionally the Blessed Mother Mary knew) appear largely confirmed. The continued work of the École biblique thus represents a (historically and critically supported) criticism of a hasty, subjective so-called literary criticism of the Bible.

Crisis and recognition

In the controversy over modernism , Lagrange was recalled from Jerusalem for one year in 1912, but without being subjected to formal doctrinal condemnations. With great loyalty to the Church, he was able to continue his research into old age.

Due to health reasons, the scientist returned to the monastery of his novitiate in southern France in 1935. Lagrange died in 1938 in the convent of St. Maximin . In 1988 Pope John Paul II initiated the beatification process. In 1992 the French philosopher Jean Guitton published a portrait of Father Lagrange written at the request of the Pope.

Publications (selection)

• M. Loisy et le modernisme , Paris 1932.

literature

• Bernard Montagnes: Marie-Joseph Lagrange. Une biography critique. Paris 2004.