VAN NOORT, GERARD CORNELIS. - Theologian, b. 10 May 1861 at Stompwijk in Holland, d. at Amsterdam on 15 Sept. 1946.
Ordained a priest on 15 Aug. 1884, he exercised the ministry for some time in various parishes; in 1892 he was appointed professor of dogmatic theology at the Seminary of Warmond, where he wrote the manuals that earned him great fame: De fide catholica (Leiden 1898), De vera religione (ibid. 1901), De Ecclesia Christi (ibid. 1902), De Deo Creatore (Amsterdam 1903), De Deo Redemptore (ibid. 1904), De Sacramentis Ecclesiae (2 vols., ibid. 1905), De fontibus Revelationis necnon de fide divina (ibid. 1906), De Deo Uno et Trino (ibid. 1907), De Gratia Christi (ibid. 1908); all of them went through several editions. Besides the series of his manuals (later completed by his successor I. P. Verhaar on notes and under the direction of V. N. himself with a vol. De Sacramentis Ecclesiae [Antwerp 1926]. De Novissimis [ibid. 1935], he published in the Dutch language some popular booklets and articles in De Katholiek and Studia catholica. Five small volumes of his sermons also appeared (1946-47). The significance of V. time; first of all in the apologetic field, given the religious conditions in Holland: more than the interpreter of the doctrine of the faith he was its defender; and then in the renewal of Thomism after the encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII, and in the struggle against modernism. For theology he drew many elements from Scheeben and from Billot; moreover he valued and introduced the results of the investigations of Batiffol and of Lagrange. V. N. was not an original theologian, but a learned connoisseur of Thomism, a skilled expositor of the most recent discoveries in the archaeological, historical and biblical field.
BIBL.: sources