PIERLING, PAUL

PIERLING, PAUL. - Jesuit, b. at St Petersburg on 1 June 1840, d. at Brussels on 25 Feb. 1922. His family, of Bavarian origin and genuinely Catholic, had settled in Russia around the middle of the eighteenth century. Five of its members entered the Society of Jesus: that is, besides Fr Paolo, his elder brother Giuseppe, his own father after becoming a widower, and two of his uncles.

P. entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1856 and was ordained priest in 1869. Until 1877 he remained in Austria and Italy; then, Gagarin (v.) had founded in Paris as early as 1855 the Work of SS. 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 permission to join his confrère and compatriot. From then on he devoted his entire life to historical studies, and particularly to 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 aposto-

country, Fr. P. considerably enlarged the Slavic Library, making it, in its field, one of the most valuable in Western Europe. In his final years Fr. P. lived in Bruxelles, leaving behind the memory of an excellent and learned religious.

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