Johannes de Jong was born in Nes, a village on the island of Ameland, as the eldest of nine children of Jan de Jong, a baker, and his wife Trijntje Mosterman. After attending the minor seminary in Culemborg from 1898 to 1904, de Jong then studied at the Seminary of Rijsenburg for four years.
De Jong did pastoral work in Amersfoort, including work with the Sisters of Mercy, until 1914, when he was made a professor at the Rijsenburg seminary on November 6. Becoming the seminary's rector on August 14, 1931, he was named a canon of the cathedral of Utrecht in 1933.
He said he didn't want to be another Theodor Innitzer, his colleague in Vienna with fascist sympathies. De Jong ordered his priests to refuse the sacraments to Nazi Dutchmen.[1]
During the Second World War, he was one of the major leaders against theNazi occupation of Netherlands. On July 26, 1942 Dutch bishops, including Archbishop Johannes de Jong, issued a decree that openly condemned Nazi deportations of Dutch workers and Jews. The Nazis retaliated by seizing 245 Catholics of Jewish descent, including Edith Stein.[2] The Vatican used the Netherlands' experience to explain its silence during the years of the Holocaust.[3] After the German retaliation, Sister Pasqualina Lehnert, Pius XII's housekeeper and confidante, said the Pope was convinced that while the Bishop’s protest cost more than two hundred lives, a protest by him would mean at least two hundred thousand innocent lives that he was not ready to sacrifice. While politicians, generals, and dictators might gamble with the lives of people, a Pope could not.[4]
De Jong was created Cardinal Priest of S. Clemente by Pope Pius XII in the consistory of February 18, 1946, but could not travel to Rome for the ceremony as he was recovering from a car accident.[5] However, on October 12 of that year, the Dutch prelate went to Castel Gandolfo to receive his red hat from Pope Pius. In 1951, de Jong, who was the first resident Dutch cardinal since the Protestant Reformation, had to leave the administration of the archdiocese to his coadjutor, Bernardus Johannes Alfrink. Meanwhile, de Jong retired to the same house where he had lived during his early priestly ministry in Amersfoort.
Death
De Jong died in his sleep after a long illness in Amersfoort, two days before his 70th birthday.[6] He is buried at St. Barbara cemetery in the court of St. Catherine's Cathedral.
References
^"Pius XII: The Holocaust and the Cold War", Michael Phayer, p. 59, Indiana University Press, 2008, ISBN978-0-253-34930-9
^Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, p.54
.jpg)
