PITRA, JEAN-BAPTISTE. – Benedictine, cardinal, librarian of the Holy Roman Church, born at Champforgeuil (department of Saône-et-Loire) on 1 August 1812, died in Rome on 9 February 1889. First a professor in the Seminary of Autun, he entered the monastery of Solesmes in 1841, was appointed prior of St-Germain in Paris in 1843, and there compiled the list and selected the editions of the Greek and Latin Fathers for Migne’s two Patrologies; he travelled from 1845 to 1850 to remedy the financial disaster of Solesmes; he was called to Rome in 1858; he travelled in Russia and Austria (1859–60), was made a cardinal in 1861, appointed librarian of the Holy Church in 1861, cardinal-bishop of Frascati in 1879, and of Porto and S. Rufina in 1884; he died poor, as he had lived, in work and solitude.
Works: the P.’s extensive production followed the various stages of his career, and in his own time it received no great attention, not even among scholars. While a professor at Autun, he acquired and published the inscription of Pettorio (1839; cf. Spicilegium, I, 554–64) and prepared: Histoire de St Léger et de l'Église des Gaules au VIIᵉ siècle, published later (Paris 1846). He collaborated on L'auxiliaire catholique, a journal founded by the abbot of Solesmes (vols. II–IV, 1845–1846), and on Univers (1851); the fruits of his years of travel (1845–50) and of his visits to libraries are: Lettre au p. Lacordaire sur le couvent d'Unterlinden (in L'auxiliaire catholique, 4 [1846]), La Hollande catholique (Paris 1850), Etudes sur la collection des Actes des saints des PP. Bollandistes (ibid. 1850), Vie du p. Libermann (ibid. 1855).
The P.’s major work revolves around three areas of interest: the Fathers of the Church, the Byzantine canonists,
the Greek hymnographers: Spicilegium Solesmenae (4 vols., ibid. 1852–58), containing, among other things, the Clef du (pseudo-) Méleton, a fragment of Papias, Commodian’s Carmen apologeticum, the Antirretica of Nicephorus of Constantinople, and the Monumenta Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (discipline, monastic and liturgical institutions); Juris ecclesiastici Graecorum historia et monumenta (2 vols., Rome 1864–68); Hymnographie de l'Eglise grecque (ibid. 1867), in which he explains the secret of Greek ecclesiastical poetry that he had discovered; Analecta sacra Spicilegio Solesmensi parata (4 vols., Paris, Frascati, Venice 1876–83); later he added the fifth: Analecta sacra et classica (Paris 1888), containing passages from fourth- and fifth-century Christian authors, derived from the Catenae Patrum; the sixth, reserved for hymns by Greek hymnographers, remained unpublished; the seventh: Juris ecclesiastici Graecorum selecta paralipomena (ibid. 1891), was published posthumously by his secretary, Msgr. A. Battandier; the eighth, outside the series (Montecassino 1881), contains the writings of St. Hildegard; Analecta novissima (2 vols., Frascati 1885–88), of which the first contains: De epistolis et regestis Romanorum Pontificum; the second: Tusculana, contains the unpublished writings of four French bishops of Frascati: Oddone di Curscamp, Oddone di Chateaureux, Giacomo di Vitry, Bertrando de la Tour.