PIERLING, PAUL. - Jesuit, b. in St. Petersburg on June 1, 1840, d. in Brussels on Feb. 25, 1922. His family, of Bavarian origin and staunchly Catholic, had settled in Russia around the middle of the 18th century. Five of its members entered the Society of Jesus: that is, besides Fr. Paul, his elder brother Joseph, his own father after becoming a widower, and two of his uncles.
P. entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1856 and was ordained a priest in 1869. Until 1877 he remained in Austria and Italy; then, since Fr. Gagarin (v.) had founded in Paris as early as 1855 the Work of the Sts. Cyril and Methodius, the Slavic Library and the Revue des Etudes religieuses, with the aim of working in every way for the reunion of the dissidents, P. obtained in 1877 to join his confrere and compatriot. From then on he devoted his whole life to historical studies, and particularly to the relations between the Holy See and the tsars, from the first attempt at union at the Council of Lyons (1274). This history was at that time completely unknown in the West; moreover, the Russians had falsified it. It was therefore a work both scholarly and apostolica, that of reporting on all the phases according to the documents gathered from the best sources and especially from the Vatican Archives. P. first gave a series of monographs which he then gathered together and completed in his masterpiece La Russie et le Saint-Siège (5 vols., Paris 1896-1912), which will remain for a long time very authoritative on the subject. An excellent bibliophile and on good terms with the intellectuals of his lic, the P. considerably increased the Slavic Library, making it in its specialty one of the most precious in Western Europe. In his last years P. lived in Brussels, leaving the memory of an excellent and learned religious.
Bibliography
II, pp. 313-15; E. Schmourlo, Il rev. p. P. e i suoi lavori storici su la Russia, ibid., pp. 316-22.
Giuseppe Maria Rouet de Journe