11 Facts About Marie-Dominique Chenu

Chenu entered the French Province of the Dominican Order in 1913, taking the name Marie-Dominique and studying at Le Saulchoir, then located in Belgium.

In 1920 Marie-Dominique Chenu was appointed Professor of the History of Dogma at Le Saulchoir.

Marie-Dominique Chenu began to develop his theological perspective replacing the non-historical approach to Thomism that he had learned from Garrigou-Lagrange at the Angelicum with an historicist reading of Aquinas.

In 1930 Marie-Dominique Chenu founded the Institut d'Etudes Medievales de Montreal.

Marie-Dominique Chenu served as rector of Le Saulchoir from 1932 to 1942, and was therefore very involved in the move of Le Saulchoir from Belgium to Etoilles, near Paris, in 1937.

In 1937 Marie-Dominique Chenu privately issued a book entitled Une ecole de theologie: Le Saulchoir.

Marie-Dominique Chenu was expelled from Paris and moved to Rouen, only being allowed to return to the Dominican convent of Saint-Jacques in Paris in June 1962.

Marie-Dominique Chenu was a theological advisor at the Second Vatican Council where he was influential in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

Marie-Dominique Chenu was a forerunner of the ressourcement in theology that preceded the reforms of Vatican II.

Marie-Dominique Chenu played a large role in the reappropriation of historic theological sources that led to the nouvelle theologie.

Marie-Dominique Chenu can be credited with being the grandfather of the liberation theology movement, since Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru, who wrote the first book on liberation theology, studied with Marie-Dominique Chenu at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and cites him numerous times in his ground breaking book.