CORNELY, KARL JOSEPH RUDOLPH. – Distinguished Jesuit exegete, b. at Breyell in the Rhineland on 19 Apr. 1830, d. at Trier on 3 March 1908. He lived for three years in Lebanon; in 1865–66 he studied in Paris, and from 1867 to 1872 he taught at the college of Maria-Laach. Subsequently exiled with his confrères, from 1879 to 1889 he held, with the highest distinction, the chair of exegesis at the Collegio Romano (Gregorian University). Before and after assuming the chair, he edited the periodical Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (1872–1879); in 1873 he founded another periodical, Katholische Missionen; in 1885 he began publication in Paris of the Cursus Sacrae Scripturae.
Besides two biographies of blesseds of the Society of Jesus, Carlo Spinola (1868) and Pietro Favre (2nd ed., Freiburg im Breisgau, 1900), and several preparatory works (Analysis), between 1885 and 1887 he published his principal work in three volumes: Historica et critica introductio in Urinque Testamentibus sacros. A few years later (1894–97), the 2nd ed. appeared. For use in schools he compiled a Compendium Introductio, in which he condensed his four large volumes; he himself prepared the 3rd ed. of the Compendium. Three further editions of the Compendium were prepared by Martin Hagen, and the subsequent ones (9th–12th) by A. Merk; there is also a French version by Mazoyer (Paris, 1907–1908). Finally, C. published important commentaries on the four major Pauline epistles: I Cor. (1890, 2nd ed. 1909); II Cor. e Gal. (1892); Rom. (1896, 2nd ed. 1925); and finally, together with F. Zorell, In librum Sapientiae (1910).