Sebastiaan Peter Cornelis Tromp (16 March 1889 – 8 February 1975) was a Dutch Jesuit priest, theologian, and Latinist, who is best known for assisting Pope Pius XII in his theological encyclicals, and Pope John XXIII in the preparation for Vatican II. He was an assistant to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani during the Council and professor of Catholic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University from 1929 until 1967.
Early life
Sebastian Tromp was born in March 1889, the first son of Cornelis Gerardus Tromp (German: Kornelius Gerhard Tromp), a teacher in the Netherlands, and Maria Catherina Lörper. His mother was from an expatriate German family, expelled during the Kulturkampf.
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.
Second Vatican Council
At the Second Vatican Council, Tromp served as secretary of the Preparatory Theological Commission at the specific request of Pope John XXIII, and, later, as the secretary of the Doctrinal Commission under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. His preparations—or schemata—were shelved, after some Western European Council fathers appealed to Pope John XXIII for total free debate on all issues. Karl Rahner considered Tromp to be a formidable theological opponent during the council debates, and gently asserted that "[Tromp] thought his schemata would simply need the blessing of the Council fathers and that would be the council. But all his schemata disappeared—not a single one was discussed".
Ratzinger and Tromp
Others opposed Tromp as well. At the Council, Karl Rahner was joined by Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), Aloys Grillmeier, Otto Semmelroth and Hans Küng, all of whom worked for the German Cardinals Josef Frings of Cologne and Julius Döpfner of Munich and Freising. Some of them opposed the schemata drawn up by Ottaviani and Tromp's preparatory commission, and when the group achieved the shelving of these schemata, it meant that the Council Fathers no longer had any written basis of preparation, and, consequently, that the conciliar bishops had no structure, strategy, or agenda to rely on.
Ratzinger was opposed to this radical move by the Rahner group, believing that it effectively derailed the Council. In his memoirs, he presents a balanced view of Tromp's schemata: