CORNELY, KARL JOSEPH RUDOLPH. - Distinguished Jesuit exegete, b. at Breyell in the Rhineland on 19 April 1830, d. at Trier on 3 March 1908. He lived for 3 years in Lebanon, in 1865-66 he studied in Paris, from 1867 to 1872 he taught at the college of Maria-Laach. Then, a refugee with his confreres, from 1879 to 1889 he held with the highest praise the chair of exegesis at the Roman College (Gregorian University). Before and after his assumption of the chair he directed the periodical Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (1872-1879); in 1873 he founded another periodical: Katholische Missionen; in 1885 he began in Paris the publication 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 some preparatory works (Analysis), between 1885 and 1887 he published his principal work in three volumes: Historica et critica introductio in Utriusque Testamenti libros sacros. A few years later (1894-97) the 2nd ed. appeared. For the use of schools he compiled a Compendium Introductio, in which he condensed his four large volumes; he himself oversaw the 3rd ed. of the Compendium. Further 3rd eds. of the Compendium were overseen by Martin Hagen, and the subsequent ones (9th-12th) by A. Merk; a French version by Mazoyer also exists (Paris 1907-1908). C. finally published important commentaries on the four major Pauline epistles: I Cor. (1890, 2nd ed. 1909); II Cor. and Gal. (1892); Rom. (1896, 2nd ed. 1925); finally, together with F. Zorell, In librum Sapientiae (1910).
Bibliography3 works
Urbano Holzmeister