Arnold Janssen

Arnold Janssen was born on 5 November 1837 in Goch, in the Lower Rhine region of the Kingdom of Prussia, the second of eleven children of Gerhard Janssen, a farmer and freight carrier, and Anna Katharina Wellen. He grew up in a devout Catholic household and showed early academic ability. After studies at the episcopal gymnasium at Gaesdonck he attended the University of Bonn, where he studied mathematics, natural sciences, and philosophy, and then completed theological formation. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Münster on 15 August 1861. For more than a decade he taught mathematics and natural sciences at the diocesan secondary school in Bocholt while also exercising pastoral duties and developing a strong interest in the foreign missions and in the Catholic press.

The Prussian Kulturkampf of the 1870s, which imposed severe legal restrictions on the Catholic Church, shaped his later work. Janssen founded and edited a popular monthly, the Little Messenger of the Sacred Heart, intended to foster prayer and material support for the missions among German-speaking Catholics. He became convinced that Germany needed its own missionary seminary, a project that many bishops and clergy regarded as premature. Because Prussian law made such a foundation nearly impossible inside Germany, he established the Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini) on 8 September 1875 in the village of Steyl in the Netherlands, just across the border, beginning in a former inn with a handful of companions. In 1879 the society sent its first missionaries, among them Joseph Freinademetz, to China.

Janssen later founded two congregations of women to share in the missionary apostolate: the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit in 1889, for active missionary service, and the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters in 1896, a cloistered contemplative community dedicated to perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Under his direction the Divine Word Missionaries expanded from China to other fields, including Togo, New Guinea, Japan, and the United States, and opened houses of formation in Europe. He combined a reserved, methodical temperament, formed in part by scientific training, with a marked Trinitarian spirituality and particular devotion to the Holy Spirit, and he insisted on linguistic, cultural, and theological preparation for missionaries.

Janssen died at the motherhouse in Steyl on 15 January 1909. By then the institutes he had founded had taken root on several continents. He was beatified by Pope Paul VI on 19 October 1975 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on 5 October 2003, together with Joseph Freinademetz. His liturgical memorial is kept on 15 January. He is remembered above all as founder of the Society of the Divine Word and of the two Holy Spirit congregations of sisters rather than as the assigned patron of a wide range of additional causes or places.