The Netherlands has not produced many members of the Sacred College of Cardinals, but several achieved great eminence. Adriaan Florenz Boyens was the sole Dutchman to become pope, as Adrian vii (1522–3) and he was also the last non-Italian pope until 1978; Cardinal Jan Willebrands (1909–2006) played a key role in opening up the Vatican to ecumenism in the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of the poor orphan Willem (Marinus) van Rossum, who served as ‘red pope’, prefect of Propaganda Fide (today Evangelisation of Peoples) from 1918 to his death in 1932, was arguably more spectacular than that of either Florenz or Willebrands, thus confirming that the Catholic Church is one of the great engines of upward mobility.

Born in Overijssel in the northern Netherlands, van Rossum was orphaned at the age of nine. He entered the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer in 1873, was professed a year later and was ordained in 1879. Then followed a rapid rise inside the Redemptorists and his transfer to Rome in 1895. During the next sixteen years he rose just as rapidly inside the Roman Curia until he was made cardinal, and successively President of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Apostolic Penitentiary and finally Prefect of Propaganda, to which he was appointed by Benedict xv in May 1918. In the early stages of the conclave of 1922 that eventually elected Achille Ratti (Pius xi), he was even considered to be a plausible compromise candidate.

Vefie Poels’s biography of van Rossum is a very fine piece of scholarship, clearly based on monumental, exhaustive research over many years. The detailed treatment of various stages of van Rossum’s life and career, and the key incidents in the latter, is truly remarkable. It throws into great relief one of the key actors in the Roman curia of the first three decades of the twentieth century, particularly his role as prefect of Propaganda. In this regard, it demonstrates that van Rossum was as important in the formulation of missionary policy between 1918 and 1932 as Celso Costantini was afterwards, if not more so. It thus obliges us to re-evaluate the contribution of popes Benedict xv (1914–22) and Pius xi (1922–39) in this sphere of papal policy. While admitting the over-arching role of these popes as the inspiration for the policies of the ‘indigenisation’ of the clergy and episcopate in mission fields to prepare for post-colonial future of those countries, on a practical level van Rossum was clearly the force driving those policies forward to give them concrete implementation. This quotation sums up Poels’s assessment of van Rossum’s achievements as ‘Red Pope’:

Though he was clearly ‘the most influential Dutchman in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, more influential even than (pope) Adrian’ (p. 583), the author makes an important point about van Rossum’s ‘relatively low profile in the historiography of the curia’ (p. 533). She is right, and her excellent biography goes a long way to correcting this. The author truly understands the day-to-day workings of the Roman curia in which van Rossum was obliged to operate, including its strengths and weaknesses, weaknesses which van Rossum would expose in his ‘parting shot’.

Poels’s biography lays bare the personal qualities, prejudices and even the strange obsessions of van Rossum, which sometimes resulted in missteps. Van Rossum’s anti-Modernism was consistent and genuine, but he did not approve of the anti-Modernist witch-hunt that scarred the pontificate of Pius x (1903–14). He was also tenaciously, if unwisely, loyal to his personal secretary and fellow Redemptorist Joseph Maria Drehmanns after the latter was banished from Rome by Pius xi in April 1930 because of his clandestine and freelance activities in the mission field, even though these activities had undermined van Rossum’s own role as head of Propaganda.

Van Rossum’s obsessive determination to revive Catholicism in overwhelmingly Protestant countries in Northern Europe, particularly his slogan ‘Bring back Scandinavia to Mother Church’, resulted in his ‘missionary journeys’ in 1923 to Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Upon his return to Rome, van Rossum published a letter, addressed ‘To my Catholic Compatriots’ in Scandinavia, whose factual inaccuracy, tactlessness and unjustified Catholic triumphalism aroused the wrath of the bishops of the region’s overwhelmingly Lutheran majority. The visits did produce some fruits – several male and female religious institutes sent ‘missionaries’ to the North and the large Christ Church Cathedral was eventually built in Reykjavik – but not the waves of conversions which van Rossum had unrealistically anticipated.

Poels suggests that van Rossum’s relations with Pius xi were not as good as those with his predecessor, Benedict xv, and that they had deteriorated to such an extent by the time of van Rossum’s death in 1932 that there is evidence that Pius xi was considering ‘sacking’ the cardinal from his role as head of Propaganda Fide (p. 559). If so, then another factor in the pope’s mind was probably van Rossum’s ‘parting shot’, a scathing denunciation of the inadequacies and inefficiency of the central government of the Church. Here Poels fairly convincingly argues that van Rossum was the author of an anonymous document, De quibusdam rebus in ecclesiastico regimini emendandis, which began to circulate in clerical circles in Rome, France, Germany and the Netherlands in December 1931. The document criticised the insularity, ignorance and inefficiency of an overwhelmingly Italian Roman Curia and the inadequacy of the top leadership of the Church, the pope included: despite the Church’s massive resources in men and money, it was thus unable to successfully meet the challenges of the modern world.

The document urged the necessity for the internationalisation of the Roman Curia, from the top downwards, and its rationalisation according to modern methods, a more collegial form of governance for the world-wide Church and called for a pope who possessed ‘character, decisiveness, elan and organisational talent’ (p. 550). These critical reflections could not have been welcome to Pius xi, whose authoritarian style of rule was notorious, but the Dutch cardinal had ably expressed for the first time a papal reform agenda, elements of which Pope John xxiii (1958–63) would tentatively experiment with thirty years later.

On a personal note, when I read the translator’s introduction, I was shocked to learn that Professor Poels died from ‘a deadly disease’ in 2022. This must have been a tragedy for her family, friends and colleagues but it is also a great loss to historical scholarship. Vefie Poels was a very fine historian and had she lived would undoubtedly have made further, very important contributions to the history of the Church in the twentieth century.