PAUL PIERLING. - Jesuit, b. in St. Petersburg on 19 June 1840, d. in Brussels on 25 Feb. 1922. His family, of Bavarian origin and staunchly Catholic, had settled in Russia around the mid-18th century. Five of its members entered the Society of Jesus: namely, besides Fr. Paul, his elder brother Giuseppe, his own father (who had become a widower), and two of his uncles.
Fr. Pierling entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1856 and was ordained priest in 1869. Until 1877 he remained in Austria and Italy; then, since Fr. Gagarin (q.v.) had founded in Paris as early as 1855 the Work of SS. Cyril and Methodius, the Slav Library, and the Revue des Études religieuses with the aim of working in every way for the reunion of dissidents, Fr. Pierling obtained in 1877 to join his confrere and compatriot. From that time onward he devoted his entire 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 then completely unknown in the West; moreover, the Russians had falsified II. It was therefore a work at once scientific and apostolic to recount all its phases according to the documents gathered from the best sources and especially from the Vatican Archives. The author first published a series of monographs, which he later gathered and expanded into his magnum opus *La Russie et le Saint-Siège* (5 vols., Paris 1896–1912), which will long remain highly authoritative on the subject. An excellent bibliophile and on good terms with the intellectuals of his country, Fr. Pierling greatly enriched the Slav Library, making it, in its field, one of the most valuable in Western Europe. In his later years he lived in Brussels, leaving the memory of an excellent and learned religious.