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, he went in 1850, already a subdeacon, to Rome, where the following year he entered the Society of Jesus. Ordained priest in 1856, after a brief period of ministry in Cologne, he taught philosophy at Bonn and at Aix-la-Chapelle, then canon law and ecclesiastical history to his fellow Jesuits at Maria Laach. Co-founder of the periodical Stimmen aus Maria Laach, he was also its director from 1879, guiding its fortunes through various changes. He was one of the most vigorous defenders of papal infallibility and the *Syllabus*, and for this reason was hated by liberals and by the "Old Catholics." He began his literary activity by writing against Döllinger’s *Jesuitenfabeln*: *Studien über die Homo-risufrage* (Freiburg in Br. 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, was the so-called *Collectio Lacensis*, or *Acta et Decreta sacrorum Conciliorum recentiorum* (7 vols., ibid. 1870–90; the last volume published by Fr. G. Th. Granderath), covering the period from 1868 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 Entwicklungen der thomistisch-molinistischen Kontroverse* (supplementary fascicles of *Stimmen*, nos. 9, 13, 14, later gathered and translated into Latin by Fr. G. Gietmann under the title: *Controversiarum de divinae gratiae liberique arbitrii concordia, initia, progressus*, ibid. 1881), which naturally provoked both approval and dissent. The discovery and publication of the notes of Paul V on the final session of the Congregation "de Auxiliis" likewise provoked dissent and accusations of forgery: *Weitere Entwicklungen der thomistisch-molinistischen Kontroverse* (ibid. 1880); but Fr. R. de Scorraille refers to the manuscript in the Borghese collection of the Vatican Library in his work: *François Suarez*, I, Paris 1912, p. 457 (cf. W. Hentrich, *Aufzeichnungen Paulus V. über die Schlussstützung der Congregatio de Auxiliis* – "A Forgery by Schneemann?", in *Scholastik*, I [1926], pp. 263–67).