Deus Providebit: Remembering Father Leo Elders, S.V.D. (August 7, 1926 – October 14, 2019)

Abstract

Deus Providebit:Remembering Father Leo Elders, S.V.D. (August 7, 1926 – October 14, 2019) Jörgen Vijgen In the last version of his autobiographical notes, which Father Elders handed to me on September 23, 2019, he praises his parents for shaping him very early on towards a priestly life of service by asking him to hand out pamphlets against alcoholism in the poor suburbs of his home town of Enkhuizen, the Netherlands, where he was born on August 7, 1926, to bring clothes his mother made to a poor family, and to play chess with a frail boy suffering from tuberculosis. The last is something that he would continue to do until his teenage years when the principal warned him: "Leo Elders, you should better practice your Greek vocabulary instead of walking around with a chessboard."1 During the Second World War, Leo Elders was finishing high school in a Catholic boarding school in the most southern part of the Netherlands, right on the border with Germany, in the former Rolduc Abbey. His father had given him a devotional card of St. Joseph and asked him to pray daily for his future state of life, which he did. One night he saw how an English bomber was being shot from the sky and the crew jumping out of the airplane. This harrowing event made him think: "If they are willing to sacrifice their lives to liberate us, shouldn't I be doing something extraordinary [End Page 355] as well?" In the Catholic culture of those days and with a lively missionary spirit among the youth in the school, the thought of becoming a missionary priest almost naturally occurred to him. He asked the moderator of the school's missionary activities for a list of congregations. When he saw what was written about the Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini)—founded by the German priest Arnold Janssen (1837–1909) who was canonized by Saint John Paul II in 2003—namely that it was the "most austere and intellectual of all the missionary congregations," his choice was made. Graduating in June of 1944, he was able to return home to the north of the Netherlands, but then the hongerwinter (literally: "hunger winter"), the Dutch famine of 1944–1945 in the north of the country due to the German blockade of food and fuel, prevented him from entering the novitiate. As with so many of his countrymen, the hongerwinter brought out the best of human comradery and ingenuity: making a primitive lamp out an empty jar, some oil, and a razor blade with some cork on it; collecting driftwood for some elderly people, taking a sack of wheat at night in a small boat to a mill to have it ground; hiding with his brother, who had escaped from a German labor camp, in a hole they had made under the wooden floor in the house, pushing a stack of old newspapers over their heads because it was said that bullets would not pass through a thick layer of paper when the Germans fired through the floor. When a member of the resistance movement, who had been active in finding safe places for Jews and others in hiding, had been arrested and it was feared that he might talk under duress, the Elders family had to flee for several weeks to different secret destinations. For their help to the resistance and in particular for hiding a number of Jews in their house, his father and mother were awarded posthumously in 2016 the honorific "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vesham (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center) and the State of Israel. Notwithstanding all this duress, Leo Elders sought to prepare himself for the novitiate. His parish priest gave him Jacques Maritain's Les Degrés du Savoir; ou Distinguer pour Unir, another priest in a nearby village introduced him to philosophy by way of Joseph Gredt's Elementa philosophia Aristotelico-Thomisticae, and in exchange for some potatoes, an Amsterdam professor gave him private lessons in Spanish. These few anecdotes already are emblematic for the both austere (idleness would never become a part of his dictionary!) and generous life of Father...