The Cardinal of Holland
Wahlen, Francis J.
THE CARDINAL OF HOLLAND By FRANCIS J. WAHLEN FIFTY years ago a young Lombard cleric, Don Achille Ratti, said his first Mass in that curiously mystical Lombard sanctuary on the narrow Corso in Rome...
...And other apostles of humble birth are by no means unknown in the ecclesiastical history of the United States...
...The reason why this discreet Dutch Redemptorist received the Roman purple, was given in the memorandum accompanying the official document of the nomination: "Propter immensam scientiam...
...The hierarchy of many countries, European and American, shows what chances and possibilities the universal Church holds out to all of her children...
...He will revindicate "the heredity of our fathers" from the bondage of Caesarism, in which the modern state-absolutism wishes, wherever possible, to keep the Church subject...
...Its surviving but persecuted Catholics had remained loyal, far more than Motley ever knew...
...The third objective of the missionary action of the Prefect of Propaganda is world-wide organization of the material resources of the movement...
...The son of a poor wage-earning cooper with a big family, later an orphan, the boy Van Rossum was brought up in the very modest Catholic orphanage of a small provincial town in Holland...
...Holland, his native country, has just honored Cardinal Van Rossum as she does only her most illustrious sons...
...So, for instance, France opposed the appointment of an apostolic delegate in China, expecting "that the Congregation of the Propaganda should take good notice of her veto...
...He has personally experienced the fact that this Christian commonwealth is offering in our days the same chances and possibilities to all men of talent, irrespective of race and national culture, as ever the pagan empire did...
...Since the days of the last "foreign" Pope, Adrian VI of Utrecht (1522-1523) a tumultuous and independent Holland had its consciousness of the Church's one and universal commonwealth somewhat dimmed...
...In secret Monsignor Costantini received his appointment, and before they knew of it in Paris, the apostolic delegate appeared in his official capacity in China and began the vast work attached to his mission...
...Often the Cardinal Prefect's vigorous missionary action has met with the greatest antagonism-open and even brutal at times-of certain governments...
...We know that the fight has not been won even yet-that the central missionary societies do not even yet get all the aid and support they deserve...
...So when the sudden news came from Rome in November, 1911: "Father Van Rossum, C.S.S.R., has been created a Cardinal of the Curia"- Catholics and Protestants alike in Holland were gratified and thrilled...
...But the nationalistic idea of Luther's Landeskirche and the stern practice, during more than two centuries, of a rigorous Calvinistic establishment, could not but leave some marked effect upon the Dutch mentality generally...
...The opposition was great from many sides...
...In 1896 the Pope named him a Consultor to the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office-one of the most important of all the Roman Congregations...
...He lives it...
...In the encyclical, Immor-tale Dei, Pope Leo XIII wrote: The Almighty has appointed the charge of the human race between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, the other over human things...
...To give further details would not be easy nor prudent: history will very soon show what calamities already have been averted from the Church in China and Japan through the diplomatic but unflinching policy maintained by Cardinal Van Rossum...
...He had to climb by sheer exertion and piety to the eminence of learning and administration which he now occupies-the missionary office of Saint Paul, next to the Chair of Saint Peter who holds the Keys...
...Such a testimonial in Rome, where men and things are weighed extremely carefully and critically, hall-marked the high quality of Cardinal Van Rossum's mind...
...The present grand council of the Church, the Sacred College, indeed, counts among its members many sons of poor fathers...
...a big task of which only an insider, like Cardinal Gasquet, could know the very painstaking labor...
...After that his star had rapidly risen...
...they are but shadows, frailer than the flowers of spring, compared to the power and privileges of the priesthood...
...Judged by this standard, no worldly dignity can compare with that of the priesthood of this Dutch cardinal priest...
...More remarkable, of course than this coincidence which has brought the golden jubilee of the present Pope and the present Prefect of Propaganda both within the year 1929, was the fact that a Hollander should have been chosen by Pope Pius X to enter the Sacred College...
...This learned Dutch Redemptorist had been called to the Eternal City by the far-seeing Pope Leo XIII toward the end of 1895, at the age of 41...
...Cardinal Van Rossum's chief characteristic seems to lie in the truly Catholic and apostolic quality of his soul...
...We live in an age of nationalism, and of its necessary antithesis, internationalism-of all sorts...
...The second objective seems to be the training of native missionaries in their own seminaries, and the giving of absolutely equal rights to these, as compared with the foreign missionaries...
...In between, Father Van Rossum wrote certain scientific treatises which were very favorably received in expert circles...
...Such matters as defending the Faith and defining heresy are in its care...
...and whereas the other Congregations are headed by a cardinal, His Holiness himself is the Prefect of the Holy Office...
...THE CARDINAL OF HOLLAND By FRANCIS J. WAHLEN FIFTY years ago a young Lombard cleric, Don Achille Ratti, said his first Mass in that curiously mystical Lombard sanctuary on the narrow Corso in Rome on one of the dark days before Christmas-he who now sits upon the apostolic Chair of Saint Peter...
...symbolical especially of the new spirit which undoubtedly has come over the Vatican since the great war, bringing Pope Benedict XV, his Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, and the present Vatican policy...
...In common estimation, the dignity of a man is reckoned by the character of the office he fills or the duties entrusted to him...
...Almost every copy of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis decrees the erection of some new mission station...
...Each in its kind is supreme, each has fixed limits within which it is contained, limits that are defined by the special object and nature of the province of each, so that there is, we may say, for each a fixed orbit, within which the action of each is brought into play by its own right...
...The mere fact of being a citizen of this world empire offered chances and possibilities which only citizens of the fast-changing British empire, or better still, the citizens of the United States, can even approximately realize today...
...That is Willem Cardinal Van Rossurn's glory-to have served faithfully God's people and his Church as priestly mediator, for half a century...
...Cardinal Van Rossum belongs to the school of thought of the Pope, Lumen in Coelo...
...But Cardinal Van Rossum knew how to prevail upon the Holy Father, and the large missionary organizations were transformed into "apostolic" missionary societies having their seat in Rome, the centre of the Catholic world...
...The danger, of course, has largely to do with the racial problem...
...This was a most urgent, but also very dangerous measure, not to speak of the enormous cost of such a world-wide scheme...
...What is a nation...
...And just two months previously it happened that an equally young Hollander, a piously learned Redemptorist, was ordained in his quiet convent at Wittem, in the south of Dutch Limburg-he who now holds the missionary office of Saint Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles...
...while on the other hand the governments of colonizing nations and European mandatory powers, like Great Britain and France, having taken over the old German colonies in Africa and elsewhere, never favored the idea of a native clergy...
...There was his Hexaemeron, a monograph on the six days of creation, receiving much praise, even as his dissertation, De Praedestinatione Christi, after Saint Alphon-sus's writings...
...That lofty unity of purpose, effort and ideal, Cardinal Van Ros-sum embodies...
...And all the while he was busy putting order into the somewhat neglected archives of the Holy Office...
...And as a true son of the Ligourian- who never allowed a moment to slip away idly, he was able to finish his De Judicio Sacramentali while gathering discriminatingly his source materials for that strong thesis of his in the work published much later, De Essentia Sacramenti Ordinis...
...With the great festival of Augustine approaching I am tempted to compare on one point Cardinal Van Rossum's soul with that of the young rhetor of Thagaste and Carthage...
...Pope Benedict XV and his successor both zealously adhered to that program, whose three main objectives may be summed up as follows: Increase of the number of missionary territories...
...The famous mission encyclical, Maximum Illud, appearing at the end of 1919, really gave forth the carefully studied mission program of the Prefect of Propaganda...
...Saint John Chrysostom has written: Speak not of the royal purple, of diadems, of golden vestments...
...But their resources are increasing steadily year by year...
...He has made the absolute liberty of the Church in ecclesiastical affairs the pivot of his tactful policy at the Congregation of the Propaganda...
...Cardinal Van Rossum cannot tolerate this-not in the European and other countries where the Church "in partibus infidelium" remains under his jurisdiction, nor in the world-wide Catholic missions...
...It has been stated that from the publication of the mission encyclical in 1919 until the end of 1928, no less than fifty-three new prefectures and forty-seven vicariates have been erected, bringing the number of missionary territories up to 435...
...The reestablishment of the hierarchy among the bishops of the Malabar rite, an event of great importance for the Church's position in the near East, must be credited entirely to the unflagging zeal of Cardinal Van Rossum...
...And is it not the first of the four characteristics of that spiritual state, the City of God, as seen magnificently by the Church Father Saint Augustine...
...not as a business at all...
...Cardinal Van Rossum, long since a Roman citizen in every possible sense, for fifteen years a great ruling prince in the world-wide City of God, has fully realized the marvelous growth and strength of the great spiritual commonwealth, evolving on astonishingly modern lines, whose big heart beats at the Vatican City...
...Louis Bertrand, of the French Academy, has admirably shown, in his Saint Augustine, how the tireless bishop of Hippo, as the providential apostle of Catholic unity at one of the most perilous periods of the early Church, drew immense energies out of his early enthusiasm for the majesty of "that marvelous thing, which was the Roman empire...
...Many tracts, learned dissertations, translations of the works of Saint Alphonsus, had come from his pen during the first dozen years of his Roman life...
...The episcopal hierarchy had been reestablished only in 1853, and the Church in Holland remained much longer under the jurisdiction of the Propaganda...
...But the great diplomatic gifts of Cardinal Van Rossum, who could no longer accept France's preposterous claim of being the traditional protector of the Christians in the Orient, outwitted all French maneuvers...
...To be called to this most important Congregation as Consultor (Cardinal Van Rossum now is one of its senior Cardinals) means nothing less than to be admitted to the very highest hierarchial councils of the Catholic Church...
...Look only at the life of this Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda...
...Of course every country has, so to speak, its own missionary activities, even its own several Maryknolls...
...Yet His Holiness, consecrating personally six Chinese bishops, and nominating Monsignor Hayasaka as bishop of Nagasaki, and Monsignors Roche and De Sonza to sees in British India even, it is presumed, against the advice of Cardinal Bourne, manifests clearly the new Vatican policy, a policy of tactful independence in spiritual matters and untrammeled facilities for the propagation of the Faith...
...He has become the almost symbolical embodiment of his high office at the Propagation of the Faith...
...That Catholic and apostolic quality of the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda has engraved its master mark indelibly upon the missionary action of the Church of our time in a quite unique and personal way...
...Unity-unity of purpose, effort and ideal...
...The Cardinal-Prefect of the Propaganda had ruled, long before the appearance of the above-mentioned mission encyclical, that the missions ought not to be considered as a private, national or colonial business...
...And the allocation of the various revenues from all the missionary aid societies to the various mission territories has always been a delicate matter...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 8
