Jacobus Johannes van Thiel

Jacobus Johannes van Thiel (born April 16, 1843 in Haarlem ; † May 16, 1912 there ) was an old Catholic bishop of Haarlem from 1906 to 1912 .

Life

He was the son of Matthias Thiel, baker and confectioner, and Maria Spruit.

From 1854 to 1860 he was a student of the city high school in Amersfoort within the old Catholic seminary . After he had completed his philosophical and theological studies at the seminary in 1862, he received on 9 November 1862 by Archbishop Henricus Loos the priesthood . After that he was vicar until 1863 and then pastor in Enkhuizen until 1885 . In the period from 1885 to 1906 he was president of the Amersfoort seminar.

Van Thiel followed with great interest the emergence and development of the Old Catholic Churches abroad after the First Vatican Council . At the Old Catholic Congresses in Munich in 1871 and in Cologne in 1872 he represented the Old Catholic Church in the Netherlands. In 1891 he made contact with the Petite Église in France, which had sought rapprochement with the Old Catholic Church. From 1893 to 1894 he worked in the Old Catholic community founded by Hyacinthe Loyson in Paris . It was thanks to him to have brought the Traité sur la primauté du Pape by the oratorian Pinel back to consciousness. He was in correspondence with theologians in many countries. His services to foreign Old Catholic Churches were recognized on June 4, 1903 by the University of Bern with an honorary doctorate .

Episcopate

His election as Bishop of Haarlem took place on June 27, 1906, he received episcopal ordination on August 27, 1906 in Amsterdam by Gerardus Gul , Nicolaus Bartholomeus Petrus Spit and Josef Demmel .

He was a member of the Rotterdam-Petersburg Committee, which tried between 1894 and 1914 to reunite Eastern and Western churches. He played an important role in the admission of the Old Catholic Church of the Mariavites in Poland to the Union of Utrecht in 1909. The following year he attended this Polish church, his knowledge of the national language benefited him.

He was also very influential in the Netherlands. He was a co-founder of Cor Unum et Anima Una , an organization that published various writings; and De Oud-Katholiek , a church magazine that was first published in 1885 and on which he worked as an editor until 1890.

In 1907 he warned in a pastoral letter against the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope , as well as against the power of the ultramontanes in the Roman Catholic Church.

Van Thiel promoted the celebration of the faithful by introducing the mother tongue in the liturgy and congregational singing and mediated various disputes between clergymen of the old Catholic character.

Honors

• Honorary doctorate from the University of Bern (1903)

Works

Selection:

• The Catholic Church in Her View of Marriage . In: German Mercury . 1882, no. 47-50.
• L'Église catholique gallicane à Paris . In: RITh 1, 1893, pp. 454-464.
• Allocation. Congrès de Rotterdam . In: RITh 2, 1894, pp. 797-799.
• The validity of episcopal ordinations in the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht . In: RITh 7, 1899, pp. 256-267.
• Sur la papauté. Un ouvrage du XVIIIe siècle à rééditer . In: RITh 13, 1905, pp. 225-237.
• Heerdelijk schrijven van Jacobus Johannes van Thiel, Bisschop van Haarlem . Haarlem 1908.

literature

• F. Smit: Thiel, Jacobus Johannes van (1843-1912) . In Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland 1, The Hague 1979 Internet version , accessed on March 2, 2011
• Dick J. Schoon : Van bisschoppelijke Cleresie dead Oud-Katholieke Kerk. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Nederland in de 19de eeuw . Valkhof Pers, Nijmegen 2004, pp. 795–797.

predecessor	Office	successor
Casparus Johannes Rinkel	Bishop of Haarlem 1906–1912	Nicolaas Prins