Sebastiaan Tromp - Ecclesiastical Career

Ecclesiastical Career

After his graduation from high school in 1907, Tromp entered the Society of Jesus at Canisius College in Nijmegen. He studied in the novitiate at Mariëndaal, and continued on for a triennium in philosophy at Oudenbosch. An exceptional Latinist, Tromp achieved a doctorate in Classical Languages from the University of Amsterdam in 1921. He 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.

Until 1929, 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. Tromp quickly attracted attention, and in 1936 he was appointed consultator of the Holy Office. 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. He 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. The purpose of these visits was to expose the teaching of Neo-Modernist theological propositions—especially those directly condemned in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis. He came under some criticism for the zeal with which he carried out these examinations.

In 1951, Tromp was made a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium. While progressive theologians despised his doctrinal orthodoxy, he was not a humorless academic, and became a much-loved preacher during annual meetings of the minor seminary at Rolduc. He also had a true pastoral personality, helping several couples obtaining an annulment of their previous marriages in the Vatican, but only after a rigid investigation; even valid annulments were often rejected as impious and sinful in the strict Catholic atmosphere of the Dutch parishes before 1960.