Joannes Gijsen

Passions

Vocation

Traits

Dutch bishop of Roermond and Reykjavík. He was ordained as priest on 6 April 1957 in Roermond. He worked two years as a chaplain in Valkenburg. He studied church history in Tilburg and Bonn. In 1964 he dissertated on Nikolaus Heyendaal, the abbot of Rolduc. In 1972, he was appointed as bishop of Roermond by Pope Paul VI. The appointment of the orthodox Gijsen was seen as an attempt by Rome to suppress the modernistic tendencies in the Dutch Catholic church. Nobody in Roermond had asked for him. He started many actions to reform schools and seminaries according to his conservative views. But he lost the support of Rome after sex scandals like voyeurism of masturbating boys in seminaries came up. In 1993 he resigned for health reasons. A collapse was near. He went into a monastery in Walpersdorf in Austra. In 1996 Gijsen moved from the heavily Catholic Dutch diocese to Reykjavik, where the Catholic population is very small and rising solely due to immigration. He remained bishop in Iceland for another ten years. In 2007 he returned home and became rector of the Carmelite Daughters of the Divine Heart of Jesus in Sittard. He withdrew and refused to give interviews. In 2014 two complaints against Gijsen for sexual abuse dating from the period 1958–1961 were deemed valid by the complaints commission of the Catholic Church. Gijsen's successor in the diocese of Roermond, Frans Wiertz, apologized for Gijsen's behaviour. Link to Wikipedia