Michel d'Herbigny

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.

[5] The Pope's plans were set down in the rescript Plenitudine Potestatis and the decree Quo aptius,[6] and involved the establishment of Apostolic Administrators in metropolitan centres, to replace the diocesan structures that had existed in Tsarist times.

D'Herbigny was selected as the man to lead this attempt, and on 26 March 1926, en route to Moscow under the pretext of an Easter pastoral visit to western European Catholics resident in the Soviet capital, he received episcopal ordination in secret and behind closed doors from Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), the Papal Nuncio in Berlin.

At the end of 1932, d'Herbigny was seriously compromised by the scandal created by Alexander Deubner, Russian priest and nephew of Clara Zetkin, the famous Communist and one of Moscow's international agents.

Within little more than a decade, all those appointed in secret by Bishop d'Herbigny had been imprisoned, exiled or executed, and the Vatican's policy of attempting to organise an underground Church hierarchy in Russia by means of clandestine consecrations was temporarily abandoned.