Michel d'Herbigny

Michel-Joseph Bourguignon d'Herbigny (French: [dɛʁbiɲi]; 8 May 1880 – 23 December 1957) was a French Jesuit scholar and Roman Catholic bishop. He was president of the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, and of the Pontifical Commission for Russia. He was secretly consecrated a bishop and was instrumental in a failed attempt to establish a clandestine hierarchy for the Catholic Church in the Soviet Union during the religious persecutions of the 1920s.

D'Herbigny was born in Lille, in northern France. He entered the Jesuit order at the age of seventeen, and studied in Paris, and in Trier in Germany. He was ordained priest on 23 August 1910. In 1911 his thesis on the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov was published as Vladimir Soloviev: A Russian Newman, and was awarded a prize by the Académie Française. Because of this, he was noticed and investigated by the Sodalitium Pianum. Having become known as the leading Jesuit Russian scholar, d'Herbigny was assigned to a teaching post in Rome in 1921. He was appointed president of the Pontifical Oriental Institute in 1922. He was appointed president of the Pontifical Commission for Russia in 1926.

By 1926 the level of religious persecution in the Soviet Union was such that the entire leadership of the Catholic Church in that country had effectively been eliminated by exile or imprisonment. Pope Pius XI took the decision to attempt the establishment of a provisional hierarchy without the knowledge, still less the approval, of the Soviet government. The Pope's plans were set down in the rescript Plenitudine Potestatis and the decree Quo aptius, and involved the establishment of Apostolic Administrators in metropolitan centres, to replace the diocesan structures that had existed in Tsarist times.

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