Louis-Marie de Blignières

Fr Louis-Marie de Blignières was born in Madrid in 1949, to French parents who were also practising Catholics. His father was at that time an army officer on active duty, and his mother was living with her own father, an engineer in a Spanish mining company. After a traditional secondary education in Paris, Fr Louis-Marie pursued scientific studies at university, and gained a master's degree in Astrophysics in 1972. He passed through a period of atheism, during which time he nevertheless continued to admire Catholicism and Christian civilisation. He returned to the practice of the faith in 1970, during an Ignatian retreat preached at a Benedictine abbey dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  His time as an agnostic and his subsequent conversion has left him with a keen desire to explain and defend the rational credibility of the Christian faith.

In 1972, he discovered again the vocation that he had first sensed as a child. After studies at a Benedictine monastery, and then at the seminary of Ecône in Switzerland, he was ordained priest in 1977 by Archbishop Lefebvre, as an oblate of what would become the abbey of Barroux in France. In 1979, he founded the Fraternity of St Vincent Ferrer in western France, between Le Mans and Rennes. This institute is Dominican in its spirituality, though distinct from the Order of Preachers. It is characterized by a traditional religious observance, the place of St Thomas Aquinas in its life of study, the use of the Dominican liturgical books in force in 1962, and a doctrinal preaching that takes many forms, especially that of retreats on the mysteries of the rosary.

In 1988, after the publication of the ‘motu proprio’ Ecclesia Dei, the Fraternity became a religious institute of pontifical right. It currently has 21 members, of whom 14 are priests, including several with canonical doctorates in theology, canon law and philosophy.

Fr Louis-Marie obtained a doctorate in metaphysics in 2003, at the university of Paris-Sorbonne. He has written several books of theology and spirituality, and he is the author of many articles in Sedes Sapientiae, the Fraternity’s journal. In 2022, a special edition of this journal was published in English.