Henri-Marie Joseph Sonier de Lubac (; 20 February 1896 – 4 September 1991), better known as Henri de Lubac, was a French Jesuit priest and cardinal who is considered one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. His writings and doctrinal research played a key role in shaping the Second Vatican Council. Early life and ordination Henri de Lubac was born in Cambrai to an ancient noble family of the Ardèche. He was one of six children; his father was a banker and his mother a homemaker. The family returned in 1898 to the Lyon district, where Henri was schooled by Jesuits. A born aristocrat in manner and appearance, de Lubac studied law for a year before, aged 17, joining the Society of Jesus in Lyon on 9 October 1913. Owing to the political climate in France at the time as a result of the French anti-church laws of the early twentieth century, the Jesuit novitiate had temporarily relocated to St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, where de Lubac studied before being drafted to the French army in 1914 due to the outbreak of the Great War. He received a head wound at Les Éparges on All Saints Day, 1917, which would give him recurring episodes of dizziness and headaches for the rest of his life. Following demobilisation in 1919, de Lubac returned to the Jesuits and continued his philosophical studies, first at Hales Place in Canterbury and then, from 1920 to 1923, at the Maison Saint-Louis, the Jesuit philosophate located at that time in St. Helier, Jersey. It was here that he would encounter the thought of Maurice Blondel and Pierre Rousselot. The encounter with Blondel would prove especially important. In 1932, de Lubac would eventually write to Blondel and tell him of his encounter with L'Action in the early 1920s, and how Blondel's thought around the problem of integralism became one of the central instigators of de Lubac's search for a renewed understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. De Lubac taught at the Jesuit College at Mongré, in the Rhône, from 1923 to 1924, and then in 1924 returned to England and began his four years of theological studies at Ore Place in Hastings, East Sussex. In 1926, the Jesuit college was relocated back to Fourvière in Lyons, where de Lubac completed the remaining two years of his theological studies. He was ordained to the priesthood