ROVENIUS, PHILIP. - Philip van Roepen, b. in Holland in 1575, d. at Utrecht on 15 Oct. 1651, from 1607 dean of Oldenzaal and provisor of the diocese of Deventer. On 11 Oct. 1614 Paul V appointed him apostolic vicar of Holland (in a certain sense the first apostolic vicar in the modern sense).
In the Consistory of 17 Aug. 1620 he was named titular archbishop of Philippi and confirmed as apostolic vicar of Holland and Zeeland. On 8 Sept. 1620 he was consecrated bishop at Vorsten near Brussels by the nuncio Sanseverino. During his administration the persecution of Catholics intensified because of the Spanish war. In 1628, departing from Brabant at great risk, he visited Holland, ordaining and confirming in the country. From 1630 he lived in hiding. A court sentence of 10 Mar. 1640 condemned him to confiscation of goods and exile; he nevertheless remained hidden in Utrecht, where he died. He was buried in the house where he had found refuge.
R., who had approved Jansenius’s Augustinus, was rigorist. He was in dispute with the religious missionary orders, which asserted their privileges and resisted admitting the jurisdiction of the apostolic vicar. The agreement with the Jesuits in 1634 was rather a truce, although the Pope and the Propaganda insisted on observance (jus pontif., I, 54-59). He gained a reputation as a theorist of missions with his Tractatus de missionibus ad Propagandam Fidem et Conversionem Infidelium et Haereticorum instituendis (Rome 1624), republished in his Respublica christiana, Antwerp.
ROUFFELLA, BARTOLOMEO - Monument to Card. B. R. Sculpture by G. Dalmata and A. Bregno (1476) - Rome, church of S. Clemente.
Other notable elements in R.’s thought include his borrowings from Malebranche (q.v.) for the theory of a rational social order founded on moral and religious conscience (cf. Malebranche, Traité de morale, I, 7 and II, 9), and from Leibniz for the monadological conception of the consciousness of Émile and its relation to the idea of perfection. Yet the sensism deriving the genesis of moral conscience from the internal crisis of natural egoism (self-love, self-interest), in the manner of French moralists and pedagogues (from Montaigne to Fénelon), still prevails. In metaphysics, however, R. leans toward deistic creationism, akin to that of the Encyclopedists (Diderot, Voltaire).