ANTIQUE Cardinal Henri-Louis-Joseph religious CDV PHOTO BY E. FONTENEAU, 1 BIS BD. GUSTAVE RICHARD CHOLET

Born in Maulévrier on October 28, 1842, Louis Henri Joseph Luçon studied at the seminary of Angers. He was ordained a priest for the diocese of Angers on December 23,1856 and appointed curate at Saint-Lambert-du-Lattay1. Charles-Émile Freppel, his bishop, leader of intransigent Catholicism, noticed him and sent him to Rome to continue his theological studies. There he obtained the degrees of Doctor of Theology and canon law in 1875. After having been parish priest of La Jubaudière from 1875 to 1883 and then parish priest of Notre-Dame de Cholet from 1883 to 1882,N 1, he was appointed bishop of Belley on November 8, 1887, ordained bishop on February 8,1888 in the church of Notre-Dame de Cholet and installed on February 24, 1888. His sympathies for the Action française are no mystery.

On 21 February 1906, he was appointed Archbishop of Reims, where he arrived on 6 April. In the meantime, he was co-consecrator of François-Marie Gieure, bishop of Bayonne, consecrated in Rome by Pius X on February 25, 1906. On December 16, 1907, he was elevated to the rank of cardinal by Pope Pius X and received the title of cardinal-priest of Santa Maria Nuova.

The same year, when he was expelled from the archbishopric following the law of separation of Church and State, Louis-Joseph Luçon transferred the chrism in a glass ampoule that he took with him. The balm of the coronation is still preserved in the archbishopric of Reims.

Absent from Reims at the time of the fire in his cathedral due to the conclave, he returned to his city on 22 September 1914 and remained there until 25 March 1918, when the military authorities forced him to evacuate. Throughout this period, he shared the life of the people of Reims under the bombs, comforting the victims, visiting the wounded soldiers in hospitals and those fighting in the trenches. Every Friday, he performs a Way of the Cross in his devastated cathedral by which he symbolically takes charge of the martyrdom of Reims.

"Your parish today," he explained to the ecclesiastics of Reims, "is the regiment, it is the trench, it is the ambulance. You may stay there. And dont our soldiers stay there? Is it not fitting that the priestly phalanx should also give its blood for the Fatherland

During and after the war, Cardinal Luçon became, like his cathedral, one of those symbols of wounded France that was shown to foreign personalities. The Archbishop of Reims played this role for delegations sent to him, among others, by the head of the Service for French Works Abroad, Jean Giraudoux, who hailed him as "a great French voice"7. In this capacity, Louis Luçon frequently received Americans, from President Wilson on 26 January 1919 to the Democratic presidential candidate James Middleton Cox in 1920, as well as various delegations to whom it was necessary to show "the ruins from which we have to rise"7. The cardinal also has great moral authority in the Church of France. During the war, he shared, with Cardinal Amette, Archbishop of Paris, the honorary presidency of the Catholic Committee for Propaganda Abroad. In November 1918, he presided over the meeting of the bishops of the devastated regions8. It must be said that the ecclesiastical province he leads includes, with the dioceses of Châlons, Reims, Soissons, Beauvais and Amiens, a large part of the former front line. President of the relief work for devastated churches, he then entered the last phase of his life, that of the necessary restorations9 : the material restoration of his diocese that the destruction imposed and the restoration of Christian France that the new political climate made possible.

Cardinal Luçons auxiliary in Reims was Ernest Neveux, titular bishop of Arsinoe, consecrated in the church of Notre-Dame dÉpernay on 29 June 1915.

Louis-Joseph Luçon died in Reims on May 28, 1930, in the middle of his priesthood, after having witnessed the devastation and then the reconstitution of his diocese. He is much loved by the population and remains in the hearts of the people of Reims as the one who accompanied them during the martyrdom of their city during the First World War. His grandiose funeral brought together many people, in particular Marshal Pétain and André Maginot, Minister of War. He rests in the archbishops vault under the high altar of the cathedral of Reims.

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