Year: 1998
Type: other
Abstract: He sought distance from home in his choice of schools.However, his father did not agree with this choice and enrolled him at Sint Willibrordus grammar school in Uden, run by the missionary Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini).Jilis passed his final exams here in 1927 and became a novice at Helvoirt for two years.In his final year here one of his teachers was Bernard Vroklage SVD 2 , later to become the first professor of ethnology at the University of Nijmegen.After taking minor orders, Jilis continued his studies at the major seminary in Teteringen.During this period he developed a preference for China as a future mission field.The region of Southern Shantung on the east coast of China was the area where the Society of the Divine Word had first been active.Here Freinademetz, who became Jilis' example, had been sent as a missionary in 1882, shortly after the foundation of the Society.In the 1920s the China mission had undergone a steady expansion.The Dutch missionary Henricus Veldman had worked in the district of Kansu Occidentalis from 1924 and in Sinkiang in Western China, on the border with Russia, from 1926.Riots and revolution in the area had obliged him in 1928 to return to The Netherlands, where he became a lecturer at the major seminary in Teteringen.Jilis, who had just begun his studies there, was as much enthralled by Veldman's vivid accounts of missionary work in a country where the inhabitants were nomads as by the popular adventure stories of Sven Hedin.The travel accounts of this Swedish scientist and globe-trotter, who travelled extensively in Eastern Europe, Asia, China and Australia at the turn of the century, and Veldman's stories complemented each other nicely.Jilis Verheijen was ordained as a priest on 28 January 1934.The three mission areas for which he subsequently expressed a preference were China, Flores, and New Guinea.Two months later he wrote to his sister Lucie: 'I am very pleased and happy to be able to teil you that today I received an appointment for Flores'.The Roman Catholic mission in Flores, Indonesia, which the Society of the Divine Word had taken over from the Jesuits in 1913, was flourishing.Consequently there was a shortage of mission workers on the island, and Jilis was sent there with eight others.However, he had to put off his journey to Flores for a year, owing to a concussion.He finally set out for the Dutch East Indies on the MS Detnpo on 25 September 1935, arriving in Ende, the port on the south coast of the island, on 1 November.From the beginning Jilis showed a distinct preference for the western part of Flores, the Manggarai region, whose language had not yet been the object of academie study.Paul Arndt SVD, who by that time had several linguistic publica-2 Vroklage, who, after finishing major seminary, studied and graduated in theology in Rome, studied ethnology in Vienna, graduating for a second time in 1934.From 1936 till 1938 he did anthropological research on the islands of Flores and Timor.
Author: Marie-Antoinette Willemsen
Language: Dutch
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3046700816