CLORIVIÈRE, PIERRE-JOSEPH PICOT DE

CLORIVIÈRE, PIERRE-JOSEPH PICOT de. – French Jesuit, born at St-Malo on 29 June 1735, died in Paris on 9 January 1820. He entered the novitiate in Paris in 1756, but the suppression of the Society of Jesus in France by the Parlements (1762) led him to transfer to the English province; there, among other duties, he served as chaplain to the English Benedictines of Brussels (1770–75). When the Society was suppressed in 1773, he became parish priest at Paramé, near St-Malo (1779–86), then superior of the college-seminary of Dinan (1786–90). Upon the proclamation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), he withdrew and remained in hiding in Paris during the revolutionary persecu-

…nary. To remedy the void created first by the suppression of the Society and then by the destruction of the religious Orders decreed by the States General (1790), he founded, amid great difficulties, two societies whose members would observe vows and a religious rule, but without common life, habit, or cloistered observances; one was the «Society of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus» (to be distinguished from the Society of the Sacred Heart, with communal life, founded in 1794 by Fathers Tournély and Varin to make up for the work of the former Jesuits); the other, established with the noblewoman Maria-Adelaide de Cicé, was the «Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary». Begun in 1791 and approved by Pius VII in 1801, both are still flourishing and deserving of the Church’s gratitude. Suspected by the imperial police on account of his family connections, C. was confined in the Temple (1804). Released at the age of 74, after five years of arbitrary detention, he became the soul of the revival of the Society of Jesus in France; after its restoration (1814), he was its first provincial and oversaw its first laborious foundations (in the form of the so-called minor seminaries).

Father de C. wrote extensively during the long years of his enforced life in hiding: La vie de M. Louis-Marie Grignion de Monfort (Paris 1785); several novenas or devotional booklets, such as Exercices de dévotion à s. Louis de Gonzague (ibid. 1785), which went through many reprints; the Considérations sur l'exercice de la prière et de l'oraison, composed in 1778 for the small group of hermits of Mont-Valérien, published in 1802, with several reprints, the best by Father Bainvel (ibid. 1928) and by Monier-Vinard in P. de C. d'après ses notes intimes (II, ibid. 1935, pp. 10–207); simple in tone, the work deserves esteem for its authoritative exposition of mystical prayer (a Pratique de l'oraison mentale rendue facile à tous les fidèles, printed under his name at Avignon in 1821, is not by him); Explication des Épîtres de s. Pierre (3 vols., Paris 1809); extensive commentaries on the Apocalypse (commentaire moral, commentaire politique et commentaire littéral), on which he worked for more than 20 years and which contained highly personal views, remained in manuscript, as did other commentaries on the Prophets and the Song of Songs; some occasional writings have recently been brought to light: Le serment de la liberté et de l'égalité, published by Canon Uzureau (Paris 1924); Les doctrines de la Déclaration des droits de l'homme, together with some fragments, published by R. Bazin in P. de C. contemporain et juge de la Révolution (ibid. 1926); his Lettres circulaires to the members of the societies he founded were printed in manuscript form (2 vols., ibid. 1935), and his intimate notes by Father Monier-Vinard in the collection Maîtres spirituels (2 vols., ibid. 1935).

#### CLOROFILLA: V. BOTANICA; ORGANICAZIONE.