Jean Daniélou

Jean Daniélou studied at Institution Notre-Dame de Sainte-Croix, Faculty of Arts of Paris and Catholic University of Lyon. The recorded working language is French. Employment is recorded with Catholic University of Paris and Études. Positions recorded include cardinal and titular archbishop. Distinctions recorded are Knight of the Legion of Honour and Véga and Lods de Wegmann Prize.

Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou was born on 14 May 1905 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was the son of Charles Daniélou and Madeleine Clamorgan. His father was an anticlerical politician who several times as a minister served in the French government, while his mother was a Catholic educator and the founder of institutions for women's education. His brother Alain (1907–1994) was a noted Indologist and historian. Daniélou studied at the Sorbonne and passed his agrégation in grammar in 1927. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1929 and during his regency taught at a boys' school in Poitiers, from 1934 to 1936. He then studied theology at Fourvière in Lyon under Henri de Lubac, who introduced him to the specialized study of the Fathers of the Church. He was ordained a priest on 19 August 1938.

During World War II, Daniélou served with the Air Force in 1939–1940. With the fall of France to Nazi Germany he was returned to civilian life and began doctoral studies, completing in 1942 his thesis on the spiritual doctrine of Gregory of Nyssa. He was then appointed chaplain to the female section of the École Normale Supérieure, at Sèvres. He spent most of his time on research in patristics, and he became, together with Henri de Lubac, one of the founders of the Sources Chrétiennes book series. In 1944 he was named Professor of Early Christian History at the Institut Catholique de Paris, later becoming dean there. Beginning in the 1950s he produced several historical studies which included The Bible and the Liturgy, The Lord of History, and From Shadows to Reality that furnished background for the development of Covenantal Theology. Thoroughly grounded in the Fathers of the Church, who worked from Scripture, Daniélou generally avoided the neo-Thomistic terminology and approach and used a more relational vocabulary, emphasizing our self-gift in response to God's gift in Jesus Christ, with the gradual unveiling of the Trinitarian life in history. Together with Henri Bouillard, he founded the Institut de science et théologie des religions (ISTR) in 1967. Pope John XXIII appointed Daniélou a peritus of the Second Vatican Council. In 1969 Pope Paul VI made him a cardinal. As a result, he was ordained to the episcopal titular see of Taormina, and assigned the title of Cardinal-Deacon of San Saba, a Jesuit-run parish in Rome. Rather like his theology professor Henri de Lubac, Daniélou twice refused the cardinalate but eventually accepted at the insistence of Paul VI. He was elected to the Académie Française on 9 November 1972 to succeed Cardinal Eugène Tisserant.

• 09 August 1973 Jean Daniélou meets A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada (Founder and Spiritual Master of the Hare Krishna Movement in Paris • File on Cardinal Daniélou on the Académie française website collapsed collapsed