Red Pope: A Biography of Cardinal Willem van Rossum C.Ss.R. (1854–1932)

Authors

Vefie Poels
Brian Heffernan (translator)

Keywords:

Colonialism, Redemptorists, Propaganda Fide, Vatican, Catholicism, Mission Studies, Missiology, History of Religion, Religious History, Church History, Missions, History

Synopsis

Arriving in Rome from the Netherlands in 1895, the Catholic priest and Redemptorist Willem van Rossum (1854–1932) rose quickly through the ranks of the curia. In many ways an outsider, he made a resounding success of his career. His zeal in the fight against the ‘virus of modernism’ earned him a cardinal’s hat in 1911, and he was appointed prefect of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1918. As ‘red pope’ or head of the Vatican’s mission department, Van Rossum led a hard-fought and ultimately successful campaign to separate missionary policy, fundraising and staffing from Western nationalism, and concentrate control over the worldwide missionary project at supranational level in Rome. He was the driving force behind two programmatic documents on the missions by Popes Benedict XV and Pius XI, which promoted the building up of indigenous churches and the educating of native clergy, thus helping to create a favourable position for the Catholic church during the subsequent wave of decolonisation. In the meantime, Van Rossum continued to decry Italian dominance in the church as well as the curia’s inefficiencies, for instance in a vituperative pamphlet that he wrote shortly before his death. This scholarly biography of Willem van Rossum rescues this great strategist behind the ‘popes of the missions’ from oblivion, and throws fascinating light on the history of the Catholic church and the Roman curia from the late nineteenth century until far into the twentieth.

Video: Interview with Vefie Poels on the publication of the Dutch edition of her magnus opus which has now been translated in English.

Author Biographies

Vefie Poels

Vefie Poels (1958–2022), who obtained a doctorate in history from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands in 2005, was affiliated for more than 35 years with the Catholic Documentation Centre (KDC) at the same university, where she worked as a researcher and deputy director. She was also a board member and the chair (2005–2015) of Stichting Echo, which promotes and facilitates historical research of religious institutes in the Netherlands. Her publications were mainly on the history of religious and on mission history, and include two histories of congregations of women religious (1997; 2008), a book on the Catholic missions in Norway (2005), a guide to a large-scale oral history project on Dutch Catholic missionaries (2005), and two volumes of a bibliography of Dutch Catholic periodicals (2012; 2018). Her biography of Cardinal Willem van Rossum was her magnum opus; the Dutch edition was published in 2021. 

 

Brian Heffernan (translator)

Brian Heffernan (1980), holds a PhD in History from Maynooth University in Ireland (2011). He has translated several books and is the author of monographs on the history of Catholicism, including Modern Carmelite Nuns and Contemplative Identities: Shaping Spirituality in the Netherlands (forthcoming). He is a research associate at KU Leuven and an editorial associate of DHGE - Louvain Dictionary of Church History.

Cover: Poels

Published

November 15, 2023

Series

Details about the available publication format: pdf

pdf

ISBN-13 (15)

9789493296206