The aim here is to take a closer look at the role of Father Henri Didon in liberal Catholicism. This Dominican friar, born in 1840 and died in 1900, has only escaped oblivion because he coined the motto Citius, altius, fortius (Faster, higher, stronger), which Pierre de Coubertin adopted for the Olympic movement, even though the Olympic question was merely peripheral to the life of this worldly religious figure. The author has sought here to complete the portrait of a figure whom he summarises as follows: ‘Like Lacordaire or Montalembert before him, Didon is not a Catholic liberal but a liberal Catholic, that is to say, a wholehearted yet non-intransigent Catholic’. Three approaches, which are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary, allow us to consider liberal Catholicism: by viewing it as a political movement, by conceiving of it as a religious stance, and by regarding it as a phenomenon of its time.
