Schneemann, Gerard

SCHNEEMANN, GERARD. - Jesuit, writer, b. at Wesel (Lower Rhine) on 12 Feb. 1829, d. at Kerkrade (Dutch Limburg) on 20 Nov. 1885.

After completing his studies at the Seminary of Münster in Westphalia, he went in 1850, already a subdeacon, to Rome, where the following year he entered the Society of Jesus. A priest in 1856, after a brief period of ministry at Cologne, he taught philosophy at Bonn and Aachen, then canon law and Church history to his confreres at Maria Laach. A co-founder of the periodical Stimmen aus Maria Laach, he was also its director from 1879, following its various fortunes. He was one of the most strenuous defenders of papal infallibility and of the Syllabus, and was hated for this by the liberals and by the "Old Catholics." He began his literary activity by writing against Döllinger's Jesuitenfabeln: Studien über die Honorisfrage (Freiburg im Breisgau 1864) and a fine series of articles on the Vatican Council. His masterpiece, to which he devoted all his energies without stint from 1869 onward, is the so-called Collectio Lacensis, or Acta et Decreta sacrorum Conciliorum recentiorum (7 vols., ibid. 1870-90; the last published by Fr. G. Th. Granderath), which runs from 1882 to the Vatican Council. On this he had already published: Sacr. oecumenici et generalis Concilii Vaticani canones et decreta (ibid. 1871). On the controversy over grace he composed: Die Entstehung und weitere Entwicklung der thomistisch-molinistischen Kontroversie (supplementary fascicles of Stimmen, nos. 9, 13, 14, collected together and translated into Latin by Fr. G. Gietmann under the title: Controversiarum de divinae gratiae liberyque arbitrii concordia, initia, progressus, ibid. 1881), which naturally aroused both agreement and disagreement. And disagreement, along with accusations of forgery, was also procured for him by the discovery and publication of Paul V's notes on the last session of the Congregation "de Auxiliis": Weitere Entwicklung der thomistisch-molinistischen Kontroversie (ibid. 1880); but the manuscript from the Borghese collection of the Vatican Library is mentioned by Fr. R. de Scoraille in his work: Français Suarez, I, Paris 1912, p. 457 (cf. W. Hentrich, Aufzeichnungen Paulus V. über die Schlussitzung der "Congregatio de Auxiliis" eine Fälschung Schneemanns?, in Scholastik, 1 [1926], pp. 263-67).

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