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Red Pope: A Biography of Cardinal Willem van Rossum C.Ss.R. (1854–1932) - cover image
Radboud University Press

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

  • Vefie Poels (author)
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TitleRed Pope
SubtitleA Biography of Cardinal Willem van Rossum C.Ss.R. (1854–1932)
ContributorVefie Poels (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.54195/VPZK6724
Landing pagehttps://books.radbouduniversitypress.nl/index.php/rup/catalog/book/red_pope
Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
PublisherRadboud University Press
Publication placeNijmegen
Published on2023-11-15
ISBN978-94-93296-20-6 (PDF)
Short abstractTranslated by Brian Heffernan. This book gives an engaging behind-the-scenes look at the life of Willem van Rossum (1854–1932), a Dutch priest from humble origins on the fringe of global Catholicism, who rose to dazzling heights in the centre of Vatican power and helped change the face of his church. The narrative is rich with evocative detail, about ideological conflicts and power politics within the Catholic church, about clerical privilege and ecclesiastical pomp and circumstance, about power relations between priests and women religious, and about the global direction of Catholic missions. It tells the story of a cardinal with a vision who was instrumental in securing the future of Catholicism by allowing the non-Western world into the very heart of the church.
Long abstractTranslated by Brian Heffernan. 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.
Print length669 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • History
  • Missions
  • Church History
  • Religious History
  • History of Religion
  • Missiology
  • Mission Studies
  • Catholicism
  • Vatican
  • Propaganda Fide
  • Redemptorists
  • Colonialism
Contributors

Vefie Poels

(author)

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.