Poul Helgesen

Poul Helgesen (also Paul Eliasen; Latin: Paulus Helie; ca. 1485 – not mentioned after 1534) was a Danish Carmelite, a humanist and historian.

Helgesen, the leading Danish example of Reform Catholicism (a minor Danish parallel of Erasmus of Rotterdam) came from the province of Halland. He became a brother of the Carmelite Order and, based at the Carmelite priory, if which he was briefly superintendent, made himself a career as a teacher of theology in Copenhagen. His ideal seems to have been a Christian-human royal power taking care of intellectual and cultural values. Relatively early he opposed King Christian II and at the fall of the king 1523 he was a representative of the rebellious noblemen, probably writing the complaint against the deposed king. However the religious line of the new king, Frederick I, disappointed him gravely.

Though a sharp critic of abuse and decline within the Roman Catholic Church he took up a quite unsympathetic attitude to the Protestant opposition and as a participant in the religious debate of the 1520s he could not avoid being a mouthpiece of the established church. He was engaged in a heated and often injuring polemic against the reformers without being fully trusted by the prelates and the religious and political development in Denmark gradually made him an isolated man. After the death of King Frederick 1533 Helgesen successfully accused the reformer Hans Tausen of heresy but the yielding attitude of the Catholic bishops and the outbreak of the Count's Feud made his results fruitless. During this war Helgesen disappears from history: whether he was killed, died of natural causes or left the country is an unsolved mystery.

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