PERRAUD, Adolphe - Lot 162

PERRAUD, Adolphe Adolphe Perraud Important 4-page L.A.S. addressed from Paris, December 28, 1869, to an anonymous friend. A lengthy account of the Vatican Ecumenical Council and the theological debates that were shaking the Catholic Church at the time. A very interesting letter written a few days before the opening of Vatican I, in which the future Cardinal Perraud frankly sets out his concerns and hopes in the face of contemporary doctrinal tensions. First, he describes his absence from Rome: "two of my colleagues at the Sorbonne [...] are in Rome as theologians", while he himself remains in Paris to continue his teaching. He then turns to the controversies surrounding the Council's orientations and the figure of Félix Dupanloup: "a good number of bishops rallied around him". Perraud develops a particularly remarkable reflection on the very nature of conciliar debates: "serious questions of faith are not dealt with in a council as they are in a parliament", denouncing the "clamor" and "exaggerations" that agitated the Catholic world at the time. He also condemned the "school of the Universe" and certain ultramontane polemics, which he considered harmful to "the spread of the faith and the progress of the Gospel". The final passage is full of spiritual and political significance. Looking back on the illusions of his youth in 1848, he writes: "I see what we would have done in the world without the invasion of these disastrous theories which have stirred up society against the Church". A first-rate document on the religious and intellectual history of French Catholicism on the eve of the First Vatican Council. An excellent account of the divisions in the French episcopate and the thinking of a future moderate and liberal cardinal. Jesus et Maria" embossed paper. Beautifully preserved despite a few folds and an old marginal annotation.