WHO WAS

Southland Times, Issue 21362, 7 April 1931, Page 8

WHO WAS

JANSEN? The religious history of Europe in the seventeenth century contains frequent mention of the Jansenists, a sect of Catholics who attracted increasing numbers of adherents and offered formidable opposition to the Jesuits until they were denounced by Pope Clement XI. in his famous bull “Unigenitus.” The founder of this sect was a Belgian, Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres, who died in 1638. As a youth, he attended the university of Louvain, then the scene of fierce theological disputes between the Jesuits and the Angustinians, the. followers of St. Augustine. Of the latter party, Jansen was a stout supporter. When he left college he continued his studies of the fathers, and dreamed of effecting a great spiritual reformation in the Catholic Church.

Rejecting a large part of the teaching which had been developed in the later history of the church, he formulated his own theories of grace and original sin, on which questions his conclusions were not very'different from the Protestant Calvin, from whom he was very far removed on other essential points. Jansen was not free from political ambition of a disinterested kind, and possibly it was his desire for the establishment of a free Belgian Republic as much as his theological speculations which called down upon him the hostility of his temporal and spiritual overlords. For nearly a hundred years after his death his doctrines continued to be preached, until they were suppressed by law in 1730.