Pierre Batiffol – was a French Catholic priest and prominent theologian, specialising in Church history.
Education
Batiffol studied from 1878 at the priest seminary Saint-Sulpice in Paris, was ordained in 1884 and continued his studies at the Institut catholique in Paris and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Under Giovanni Battista de Rossi in Rome, he studied from 1887 to 1889 the archaeology, research and liturgical antique Christian literature.
Career
He had also a particular interest in the history of dogma. He was taught by church historian Louis Marie Olivier Duchesne. From 1889 to 1898 and from 1907 until 1929, he lectured at Ecole Sainte-Barbe in Paris.
In 1899 he founded the "Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique".
In 1898 he became the head of the Institut catholique in Toulouse. He used historical criticism method in his theological research.
He applied strict critical method while studying the Church dogma and history as well as manuscripts of the Holy Scripture. He lost his chair in the Institute in the aftermath of the publication of Pascendi dominici gregis (8 September 1907) encyclical of Pope Pius X. That was due particularly to his book on the Eucharist (1905) being put on Index librorum prohibitorum and his affinity to the historical criticism method.
He was considered falling into the Catholic modernism.
Batiffol examined Codex Beratinus, Beratinus II, Codex Curiensis, and several other manuscripts. He rediscovered and described Codex Vaticanus 2061 in 1887.