page_title: Pontifical Oriental Institute
section_title: The First 100 Years
hierarchical_section_title: Pontifical Oriental Institute / History / The First 100 Years
caption_attribution_description: English: Pope Benedict XV. Austrian postcard of 1915 with the portrait by Berthold Dominik Lippay
context_page_description: The Pontifical Oriental Institute, is a Catholic institution of higher education located in Rome. The plan of creating a school of higher learning for Eastern Christianity had been on the agenda of the Catholic Church since at least Pope Leo XIII, but it was only realized in 1917 by Pope Benedict XV. The Orientale forms part of the consortium of the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute, both in Rome. All three institutions are run by the Society of Jesus. While the Orientale depends on the Holy See, its management is entrusted to the Society of Jesus. Its Chancellor is the Prefect of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches and its Vice-chancellor is the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, while the Congregation for Catholic Education is the dicastery competent for approving the academic programmes of the Orientale.
  The student population for the academic year 2018-2019: 351 in the Faculty of Eastern Ecclesiastical Sciences; 71 in the Faculty of Eastern Canon Law; Total: 422, of whom 242 were guest students. Each year, another approximately 400 scholars visit the library for research purposes.
context_section_description: The Orientale was created as a twin institution to the Congregation for the Eastern Church, whose name would change in 1967 to Congregation for the Eastern Churches. Without the link to this important organ of the Holy See, it would be impossible to grasp the purpose and mission of the Orientale, nor how the Orientale could be founded in the midst of the “useless massacre” of World War I, 1917. The question to which the creation of the Orientale was meant to be the answer had been long in coming. Known as la question d’Orient, the question was first posed after the Ottoman’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Russians in 1774 (cf. the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainarji), becoming ever more poignant ever since Napoleon set foot in Egypt in 1798: what was to be done with the millions of Christians under the Ottomans once the Ottoman empire would disappear? The question reached its acme in the Eucharistic Congress of Jerusalem in 1893, when the Eastern Catholic Patriarchs made the grievances of their communities known to the papal legate, Cardinal Benoît Langenieux, who forwarded them to the pope. Leo XIII at once convoked an assembly of Eastern Catholic Patriarchs for the following year (1894), from which emerged the apostolic letter Orientalium dignitas, known as the Magna Charta of the rights of Eastern Catholics.
  
  With the collapse of the Russian empire a reality after the February revolution of 1917 and the demise of the Ottoman empire in sight, the pope decided to act. With the motu proprio regarding the Eastern Congregation, Providentis Dei (1.05.1917), the pope created the Oriental Congregation; with the other motu proprio Orientis catholici (15.10.1917), he created the Orientale. The pope reserved to himself the prefecture of the new Congregation, whose head was therefore only a Secretary, although a cardinal (cfr. canon 257 of the Pio-Benedectine Codex Iuris canonici of 1917 specified precisely this). Already three years after founding the Orientale, Benedict XV granted it, through the apostolic constitution, Quod nobis in condendo, the right to confer degrees. From the start the pope insisted on the necessity of a richly supplied Eastern library to second the study and the research of the Orientale population.
  At the beginning the professors were chosen from various orders and even among lay people. These were a White Father, Antoine Delpuch (1868-1936), who served as pro-president in the first year of the Orientale’s functioning (1918-1919); two Benedictines, including Ildefonso Schuster; three Assumptionists, including Martin Jugie (1878-1954), a professor at the Orientale for only the first few years, but who was to write a monumental synthesis of the history of Eastern theology; a Dominican; a Mechitarist; four Jesuits, including Guillaume de Jerphanion (1877-1948), a famous archaeologist; two Russians, a Greek and an Ethiopian; and three lay persons, including Michelangelo Guidi, an outstanding philologist and a historian.
  Soon after Pius XI became pope he felt that it would be better if one order took care not only of running the place but also of preparing those who could eventually take over. His choice fell on the Jesuits, and in a brief to Fr. General Vladimir Ledochowski (14.09.1922) he entrusted to the Order the Orientale. This had been the suggestion of Abbot Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, OSB, who had also become, in the meantime, the first full president. Now it was the turn of the first Jesuit president (1922-1931), and that was Michel d’Herbigny (1880-1957). A very talented man, he managed to impart to the nascent institution new élan, with its own publications and even the new seat in the Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore. Complications on his very delicate mission to Russia led to his early retirement. D’Herbigny was followed as president by Emil Hermann (1932-1951), a German canon lawyer of note, whose prudence helped him guide the Institute during the war period; Ignacio Ortiz de Urbina (1951-1957), a Basque and a renowned patristic scholar; Alphonse Raes (1957-1962), an accomplished Syriac scholar who
caption: Pope Benedict XV
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2019:06:25 03:01:45", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4461", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "528", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "762"}