Sebastiaan Peter Cornelis Tromp was a Dutch Jesuit priest, theologian, and Latinist, who is best known for assisting Pope Pius XII in his theological encyclicals, and Pope John XXIII in the preparation for Vatican II.
22 Facts About Sebastiaan Tromp
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Sebastiaan Tromp was an assistant to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani during the Council and professor of Catholic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University from 1929 until 1967.
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Sebastian Tromp was born in March 1889, the first son of Cornelis Gerardus Tromp, a teacher in the Netherlands, and Maria Catherina Lorper.
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Sebastiaan Tromp's mother was from an expatriate German family, expelled during the Kulturkampf.
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Sebastiaan Tromp studied in the novitiate at Mariendaal, and continued on for a triennium in philosophy at Oudenbosch.
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An exceptional Latinist, Sebastiaan Tromp achieved a doctorate in Classical Languages from the University of Amsterdam in 1921.
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Sebastiaan Tromp received Holy Orders on 8 October 1922 and thus became a Jesuit priest; he completed his theological studies in 1926 at the Pontifical Gregorian University.
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Until 1929, Sebastiaan Tromp taught as a professor of Latin, Greek, and fundamental theology at the Theologicum of the Jesuit Order in Maastricht, when he was relocated to the Gregorian University as an instructor in the same subject.
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Sebastiaan Tromp quickly attracted attention, and in 1936 he was appointed consultator of the Holy Office.
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Sebastiaan Tromp had already elaborated on the dangers of Nazism by 1937, and translated and referenced the encyclical 1937 Mit brennender Sorge against the errors and dangers of the National Socialist state.
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Sebastiaan Tromp was appointed apostolic visitator, and performed apostolic visitations of professors at Dutch major seminaries and the Catholic University of Nijmegen in 1939, after the end of the Second World War, and in 1955.
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Sebastiaan Tromp came under some criticism for the zeal with which he carried out these examinations.
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In 1951, Sebastiaan Tromp was made a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium.
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At the Second Vatican Council, Sebastiaan Tromp served as secretary of the Preparatory Theological Commission at the specific request of Pope John XXIII, and, later, as the secretary of the Doctrinal Commission under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani.
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Recently Sebastiaan Tromp's theology has merited some attention in relation to the Vatican II definition on the identity of the Catholic Church with the Body of Christ, which he influenced.
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Father Karl J Becker, a professor at the Gregorian University, has argued that the phrase "subsists in" was intended by Tromp "to reiterate that the Church of Christ, with the fullness of the means instituted by Christ, perdures forever in the Catholic Church".
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Sebastiaan Tromp considered the heart, the superior of all parts of the body, a better image.
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The heart, continued Sebastiaan Tromp, is consubstantial with the head and the body, just as Mary's human nature participated with that of Christ and the members of his body.
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Sebastiaan Tromp concluded that because of her motherly love of Christ and of all the members of his body, she deserves to be identified with the heart.
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Sebastiaan Tromp was already mother of the head, he wrote, but under the cross she was named mother of all its parts.
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Sebastiaan Tromp was member founder of the Pontifical Academy of Mary.
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Sebastiaan Tromp published more than 130 books and articles during his lifetime.