Adolf Heinen

Adolf Heinen (born August 19, 1897 in Cologne , † January 29, 1975 in Münster ) was a German Roman Catholic clergyman, Jesuit , missionary scholar and writer.

life and work

Training to become a priest and Jesuit

Heinen grew up as the son of a special school teacher in Cologne. He entered the Society of Jesus on April 26, 1916 in the Bonifatiushaus in 's-Heerenberg (Netherlands). From July 1916 until the end of the war he did military service on the Western Front with the chaplain Father Josef Kruchen SJ (1876–1933). From 1919 to 1927 he made his philosophical and theological studies in the Ignatius College of the Jesuits in Valkenburg (Netherlands) and was ordained a priest there on August 27, 1926. 1927-1928 he completed the tertianship in Salamanca .

Editor of the magazine The Catholic Missions

Between 1922 and 1923, between his studies, Heinen had already done an internship at the Jesuit magazine The Catholic Missions in Bonn. After completing his religious education, he worked from 1928–1932 as a member of the editorial team of the magazine and from 1933 as its editor. Under the pressure of the Nazi regime, it became more and more difficult to design the magazine. Their circulation shrank to a few thousand copies.

Suppression by the Nazi regime

In the first half of 1938, Heinen received three letters from the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Berlin, each with a sharp reference to the publication of certain articles in which he ridiculed the people who believed in God, rejected racial doctrine as the basis of the National Socialist state, and finally sabotage in general was accused at the Fuehrer's work. In a reply to Berlin, Heinen tried to explain his point of view. It was in vain. In August 1938 the magazine was banned "forever" as anti-subversive. Heinen remained in Bonn as Minister of the House until the Gestapo confiscated the house in 1941 and drove the Jesuits out of the city.

As a priest in pastoral care

After his work in Bonn was destroyed, Heinen went to pastoral care as a priest and took over a chaplaincy in Amöneburg from 1941 to 1945 . After the war he returned to Bonn again, was appointed Vice-Superior of the newly emerging Bonn Jesuit House in 1945 and, from 1947 onwards, helped the new editor Joseph Albert Otto to rebuild the suppressed magazine Die Catholic Missionen . From 1950 to 1954 he was editor of the order magazine “Canisius. Messages from the Jesuits. North German Province ”in Cologne, from 1954 to 1964 prison chaplain in Cologne's“ Klingelpütz ”, since 1960 also minister in the new Jesuit branch of St. Peter in Cologne. After a heart attack in 1964, he worked as a chaplain in the Carmelite Convent of St. Josef Waldfrieden near Auderath in the Eifel until 1973 . He spent the last years of his life from 1973 in the Jesuit retirement home in Haus Sentmaring in Münster, where he died on January 29, 1975 at the age of 77. He was buried in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne.

Works

• Under the redskins of Canada. History of the Huron Mission and its martyrs, the 8 holy missionaries from the Society of Jesus . Saarbrücken printing and publishing house, Saarbrücken 1930 (about Jean de Brébeuf , Isaak Jogues and companions).
  • (Spanish) Entre los pieles rojas del Canadá. Historia de la Misión de los Hurones y de sus misioneros, los ochos santos Mártires Canadienses de la Compañía de Jesús . Apostolado de la prensa, Madrid 1932, 1940; Fundación Maior, Madrid 2017.

literature

• In memory of P. Adolf Heinen SJ (online)
• Klaus Schatz : History of the German Jesuits (1814–1983) . Volume 5. Aschendorff, Münster 2013, p. 200.