Michel d'Herbigny

Michel-Joseph Bourguignon d'Herbigny was a French Jesuit scholar and 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 also had an important role in the founding of the Collegium Russicum and saw it as his mission to bring about the unification of the Russian Orthodox with Rome. However, the Catholic clergy in the Soviet Union were arrested, and his efforts were also opposed by the Catholic Church in Poland. In 1933 he was removed from his offices and in 1937 he was made to abdicate his titular see in unclear circumstances.