Jan Roothaan

Very Rev. Jan Philipp Roothaan, S.J. (23 November 1785 – 8 May 1853) was a Dutch Jesuit, elected 21st Superior-General of the Society of Jesus.

He was born to a once-Calvinist family emigrated from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, where they became Catholic. When Jan Philipp, the youngest of three brothers, was sixteen he graduated from the gymnasium of his native town. From there he passed to the Athenaeum Illustre (high school), and continued his classical studies for four years under Professor David Jacob van Lennep. As an altarboy at de Krijtberg church of Amsterdam the young Roothaan came in touch with ex-Jesuits priests who sent him to Russia when he expressed the desire to become a Jesuit. In 1804 he left his homeland to join the Society of Jesus whose survival in Russia had been recently approved by Pope Pius VII (1801). On the conclusion of his novitiate in Dunaburg, Latvia, he was appointed teacher at the Jesuit gymnasium at Dunaburg from 1806 to 1809. He had already mastered Polish; as a native of Holland, he naturally also spoke French, while the classical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were also familiar to him. He subsequently studied philosophy and theology at the Jesuit College in Polotsk, and in 1812 was ordained priest.

The following four years (1812–16) were spent as professor of rhetoric at Pusza; this was the stormy era of the Napoleonic Wars, the same time period that saw Pius VII restore universally the Society of Jesus (1814). The next four years, 1816 to 1820, Roothaan worked partly as teacher and partly in pastoral duties at Orsha in White Russia (modern Belarus). However he had hardly made his final religious profession in the Society (1819) that he was sent into exile by the banishment of the Jesuits from Russia (1820). The exile road ended in Brig, Switzerland. There again he taught rhetoric for three years. Roothaan was subsequently appointed to the rectorship of the newly founded college at Turin and soon after, in 1829, vice-provincial of Italy.

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