SCHNEEMANN, GERARD. – Jesuit, writer, born at Wesel (Lower Rhine) on 12 February 1829, died at Kerkrade (Dutch Limburg) on 20 November 1885.
Having completed his studies at the Seminary of Münster in V., he went to Rome in 1850, already a subdeacon, and entered the Society of Jesus there the following year. Ordained a priest in 1856, after a brief period of ministry in Cologne he taught philosophy at Bonn and Aachen, and then canon law and ecclesiastical history to his fellow religious at Maria Laach. Co-founder of the periodical Stimmen aus Maria Laach, he was also its director from 1879, following its varying fortunes. He was one of the most strenuous defenders of papal infallibility and of the Syllabus, and was consequently hated by the liberals and 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 First Vatican Council. His masterpiece, to which he devoted all his strength without reserve 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 extends from 1882 to the First Vatican Council. On this subject he had already published: Sacr. oecumenici et generalis Concilii Vaticani canones et decreta (ibid. 1871). Concerning 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 approval and dissent. Dissent and accusations of forgery were likewise brought against him by his discovery and publication of Paul V’s notes on the final session of the Congregation “de Auxiliis”: Weitere Entwicklung der thomistisch-molinistischen Kontroversie (ibid. 1880); however, Fr. R. de Scoraille refers to the manuscript in the Borghese collection of the Vatican Library 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).