GERLIER, Pierre Marie Cardinal (1880-1965)
Price: $95.00
Description:French cardinal. Born in Versailles. Began his career as a lawyer before pursuing the priesthood. Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes; Archbishop of Lyon and Primate of Gaul. Papabile in the conclave of 1939. Created a cardinal in 1937.
LS- Typewritten Letter Signed, one page, 1963, concerning a request that he recommend the appointment of a prelate to serve as rector of the French Seminary in Rome. Excellent example. Boldly signed on his heraldic crested stationery.
During WWII, Gerlier condemned Pierre Laval’s deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, the severe conditions of which he also opposed. Moreover, he asked that Roman Catholic religious organizations to take Jewish children into hiding. For his efforts to save Jews he was posthumously awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1981.
Cardinal Gerlier championed the Worker-Priest movement and ecumenism, including endorsing the Taize Community. (Nota bene: elsewhere in this section we have a rare letter of the founder of the Taize Community who was brutally murdered by a fanatic). Cardinal Gerlier received Edouard Herriot’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism in 1957. Gerlier lived only long enough to attend the first three sessions of the Second Vatican Council.