Jean-Baptiste Janssens - Early Life and Schooling

Early Life and Schooling

Janssens' first schooling was in the Diocesan Secondary School in Hasselt, and his university years, where he excelled in philosophy and classical philology, were spent at St. Aloysius University Faculty in Brussels. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in Drongen on 23 September 1907, and took his first vows in September 1909.

After the usual two years of philosophy spent at the Jesuit Theological college in Leuven he earned his doctorate in civil law at the Catholic University of Louvain. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Gregorian University in Rome where he added a doctorate in Canon law to the one he had earned at Louvain.

He taught canon law at the Jesuit Theologate in Leuven from 1923 until 1929 and became its rector on 17 August 1929. On 15 August 1935 he was appointed Tertian Master and in 1938 became Provincial of the Northern Belgian Province of the Jesuits.

In 1939, Father Janssens made an official visit to the Jesuit missions in Zaire, at the time a colony of Belgium and known as the Belgian Congo. With the exception of this visitation and his two years studying in Rome, he had spent most of his life in his own province: in Leuven, Drongen (Ghent), Antwerp, and Brussels. In 1945 he kept in hiding a large group of Jewish children in the very Provincial's residence of Brussels, which earned him the title of Righteous among the nations.