If we ask a member of the Society of the Divine Word where the name of the congregation comes from, we will most likely hear in response that the founder, St. Arnold, gave us this name because he was a great devotee of the Word of God. This devotion began already in his childhood, since his father, Gerhard, had the custom of reciting the Prologue of the Gospel of St. John. But is this version really true? On the other hand: on what grounds should we doubt it? Has anyone ever heard of an alternative version of events?

I was once greatly surprised by the words of the fourth Superior General of our congregation, Fr. J. Grendel. In a circular letter dated 8 September 1934 he writes:

“It is true that up to the present it has not been completely clarified, and perhaps it will never be possible to clarify completely how and from where this name appeared in the spiritual consciousness of our Father and Founder; that is, what paths of thought led him to choose this name for his congregation” (Nuntius II, p. 73).

This statement is surprising. How is it possible that the Superior General did not know where the name of the congregation came from, even though he personally knew Fr. Arnold and, moreover, Fr. H. Fischer’s books on the history of the congregation—presenting the origin of our name—had already been published?

Fr. Grendel’s doubts are, of course, entirely justified. The claim that the name of our congregation comes from the Janssen family tradition may be very misleading. First of all, the fact that Arnold Janssen’s father recited the Prologue is not mentioned by Arnold himself but by his brother Wilhelm, who as a Capuchin bore the name Juniperus. Nowhere in the sources do we find a statement by Arnold Janssen himself such as: I named the congregation after the Word of God because my father recited the Prologue. Why, then, has this statement become so widespread? Perhaps because no other explanation was available?

As a curiosity, it may be noted that St. Arnold himself, after becoming a priest, recited the Prologue every day—something that hardly anyone ever mentions. Where does this information come from if it is absent from the source literature? The explanation is very simple. Before the Second Vatican Council, the Holy Mass in the Catholic Church ended with a rite called the Last Gospel. After the blessing, the priest returned to the altar and read … the Prologue of the Gospel of St. John! It never ceases to surprise me that this fact has not entered the collective awareness of the Divine Word Missionaries. From the moment he was ordained on 15 August 1861 until the moment when St. Arnold decided to name the congregation in honor of the Word of God (25 March 1875), 4,870 days passed—and approximately that many times our founder had the opportunity to read the Prologue.

But how do we know that it was precisely on that day that Fr. Arnold conceived the name of the congregation? It seems that Fr. Grendel was not at peace with the question of the origin of our name and wanted to answer the question he posed in 1934: “how and from where this name appeared in the spiritual consciousness of our Father and Founder.” In Nuntius SVD, vol. IV, fasc. 1–5, p. 107, he quotes the words of Fr. Hermann auf der Heide—Fr. Arnold’s personal secretary and confessor:

“During the thanksgiving after Holy Mass, the thought suddenly and unexpectedly came to him to name the new congregation after the Word of God. Precisely the fact that this thought was not rooted in his earlier reflections and considerations but, on the contrary—as he himself said—flashed suddenly and unexpectedly in his mind indicates that this thought was given to him by God himself.”

This quotation represents a complete shift in perspective in research on the origins of our name. Until now, it had been assumed that the name developed gradually—that Arnold Janssen named the congregation as a result of a personal spiritual experience connected with the Word of God. For this reason, attention was focused on testimonies emphasizing the presence of this idea in Arnold’s thinking. It turns out, however, that Fr. Arnold himself never said: I named this congregation because I had always been a devotee of the Word of God. According to the testimony cited above, even if the Word of God was close to him, the idea of naming the congregation in its honor “was not rooted in his earlier reflections.” The origin of the name of our congregation therefore comes from inspiration—and this changes a great deal.

First, attempts to explain the origin of the name on the basis of the earlier presence of the idea of the Word of God in Arnold Janssen’s life largely lose their significance. This is important because understanding the origin of the congregation’s name according to an evolutionary scheme may mislead the researcher—and this happens quite often. Many candidates to the congregation imagined that the name had a biblical foundation. Only later did they realize that the biblical component is lacking and that the name of the congregation does not derive from an apostolate or a text, but from the Second Person of the Trinity.

Second, this fact should lead to the conclusion that Arnold Janssen’s relationship to the Word of God after 25 March 1875—the moment of inspiration—ought to be carefully analyzed. Until now, however, no research has been carried out in this direction. The topic has been presented in a synthetic manner and without a chronological dimension, which is all the more significant since beginning in 1884 the figure of the Holy Spirit increasingly came to dominate Arnold Janssen’s spiritual horizon. As a result, what was connected with the Word of God, although still important, gradually receded into the background before this new dominant theme.

Third, what has been said above also implies an important consequence for generations of Divine Word Missionaries who seek to live this charism within their own historical contexts. The Founder did not say the last word regarding the charism, which should be continually actualized and enriched through the lived experience of each time and context. Fr. J. Grendel already wrote about this in the aforementioned article of 1934:

“It belongs to the ways of God and to divine wisdom to bring about the synthesis, to determine and shape the whole world of details and of future development even in the smallest things.”

—————–

Member of the Editorial Team of the website VivatDeus.org. In 1985, he entered the Society of the Divine Word in his native Poland. He completed his OTP experience in Argentina. He worked in Spain, where he earned a licentiate in biblical theology. From 2003 to 2022, he worked in Russia, teaching at the seminary and serving at St. Olga Parish in Moscow. Currently, in Poland he is dedicated to deepening his understanding of the spiritual history of Arnold Janssen and to spiritual animation.