The Life
Arnold Janssen was born on November 5, 1837, in Goch, in the Rhine district of Prussia, the second of ten children of a devout Catholic farming family. He was ordained a priest in 1861, taught mathematics and natural sciences in a secondary school for twelve years, and might have lived out his days as a quiet teacher-priest in the German Rhineland — except that the Kulturkampf of Bismarck's Prussia, which systematically dismantled Catholic institutional life in Germany in the early 1870s, closed off one avenue after another and pushed him toward the one avenue that the state could not close: foreign mission.
He became convinced in the early 1870s that the Catholic Church urgently needed a religious congregation dedicated exclusively to foreign mission work — trained missionaries who would go not to already-Christian countries but to those where the Gospel had not yet been preached. Germany had no such congregation. He began by founding a small mission magazine, the Little Messenger of the Sacred Heart (1874), to generate awareness and funds, and then — when he could find no German bishop willing to host his proposed missionary house — crossed the border into the Netherlands and founded the Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini, SVD) in Steyl on September 8, 1875. The founding community was himself and one other. The house was a rented tavern.
From this improbable beginning, Arnold Janssen built one of the largest Catholic missionary congregations in the world. He sent the first SVD missionaries to China in 1879, to Togo in West Africa in 1892, and to Argentina, the United States, the Philippines, Japan, and dozens of other countries in the years that followed. He founded two congregations of missionary sisters: the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit (SSpS) in 1889 and the Contemplative Sisters of the Holy Spirit (SSpSAP) in 1896. By the time he died on January 15, 1909, the SVD had over 700 members working in mission fields across five continents.
Janssen was canonised by Pope John Paul II on October 5, 2003. He is remembered as a man of extraordinarily practical faith — a mathematician-priest who approached the problem of world mission with the same systematic energy he had applied to teaching science, who understood that prayer and scholarship and institutional organisation were not opposed to mission but essential to it. He insisted that the SVD houses maintain theological libraries and academic journals alongside the chapels and mission offices. He wanted missionaries who could think as well as preach. The motto he gave his congregation was: May the darkness of sin and the night of unbelief vanish before the light of the Word and the Spirit of grace.
The founding at Steyl — a rented tavern and two men
When Arnold Janssen could find no bishop in Germany willing to allow him to found a missionary training house — the Kulturkampf was in full force, the bishops were under pressure from the state, nobody wanted to attract more attention — he went to the Dutch village of Steyl, near Venlo on the Maas River, and rented a former tavern. On September 8, 1875, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, he blessed the building, hung a picture of Our Lady Star of the Sea, and declared the Missionary House of the Divine Word open. There were two of them. The house had no students, no endowment, no official recognition, and no immediate prospects. Within three years, the first SVD missionaries were preparing for China. Within ten years, the Steyl complex had grown to include a printing press, a training college, a chapel, and a community of dozens. The rented tavern had become the mother house of a global missionary movement. What Arnold Janssen founded at Steyl on September 8, 1875, is today the SVD — 6,000 priests and brothers working in 80 countries. It began with two people and a rented tavern. The China Mission — the first sending In 1879, Arnold Janssen sent the first three SVD missionaries to China. He had trained them carefully, insisted on language study, and sent them with a clear theological vision: they were going not as colonisers or representatives of European civilisation but as servants of the Word — Verbi Divini, the Word of God, which is prior to any culture and belongs to all. The SVD China mission would grow to be one of the largest Catholic missionary presences in China in the early twentieth century. Many SVD missionaries in China were martyred under the Boxer Rebellion and later under Communist persecution. They had gone knowing they might not come back. Janssen had sent them knowing the same thing. The Printing Press — mission through media From the very beginning, Arnold Janssen understood that mission required media. His first instrument was a magazine. At Steyl, he established a printing press that became one of the most productive Catholic publishing operations in Europe. He understood that words — written and printed, translated and distributed — could go where missionaries could not. The SVD mission has always been a mission of media and communication alongside the mission of presence. Janssen was ahead of his time: he would have recognised immediately the potential of the internet for mission. He saw the printing press the same way.
Walk in Their Footsteps
Pilgrimage sites connected to St Arnold Janssen
Ask St Arnold Janssen to Intercede
Bring these intentions to this saint in prayer:
Arnold Janssen started with two people and a rented tavern on September 8, 1875. He had been turned down by every German bishop he approached. He had no money, no community, no official recognition. He had a conviction — that the world needed missionaries — and a willingness to begin with what he had, where he was, with whoever was willing to start. What he built from that beginning now spans 80 countries and touches millions of lives. The size of the beginning is not the measure of the end. What matters is whether you begin, and whether you begin honestly, with prayer and work and the willingness to cross the border when the door in your own country is closed.
“How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
St Arnold Janssen, founder and missionary, man of the Word — give me your stubborn willingness to begin with what I have, even when what I have seems absurdly small. Give me your vision of a world too small to contain God's love, and give me the practical intelligence to do something about it. Pray for the missionaries of today — for those in dangerous places, for those who are tired, for those who wonder if the work is bearing fruit. And pray that more will go. The harvest is plentiful. The labourers are still few. Amen.