Nationality Dutch Education Priest
Writer | Name Joop Roeland | |
Born 23 March 1931 Haarlem, Netherlands Known for Celebrating Mass at Christmas during the Occupation of the Hainburger Au Died March 18, 2010, Vienna, Austria | ||
Joop Roeland OSA (1931–2010) was a priest. He was born in the Netherlands and relocated to Vienna at the end of the 1960s. Roeland briefly played an important part in the Occupation of the Hainburger Au, which was a turning point for environmental awareness, especially in German-speaking Central Europe.
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Early years
Joop Roeland was the second of four children born in Haarlem to a bank official and his wife. Haarlem has a strong Roman Catholic tradition, and Roeland attended an Augustinian school. Here he took the decision to join the Augstinian Order himself.
He studied philosophy and theology at the universities of Eindhoven and Nijmegen. After his ordination he studied German language, literature and linguistics at Utrecht. He then taught German at a secondary school in Utrecht. He moved to Munich to progress his Germans studies, with the then high-profile Catholic intellectual, Romano Guardini before returning to the Netherlands to take up another school teaching post, this time in the Rotterdam conurbation at Schiedam.
Migration
In 1967 Joop Roeland came to Vienna for a sabbatical year, intending to progress his doctoral dissertation. The dissertation was never finished, but by 1970 the relocation had become permanent when Cardinal König appointed Roeland Chaplain to the catholic High School Community.
Fame, briefly
He hit the headlines at the end of December 1984 when he celebrated Christmas Mass at the Hainberger Au flood plain. The Hainberger Au was at this time under occupation by a large number of environmentalist protesters and their sympatizers. The occupation, undertaken to block the building of a proposed hydro-power plant, had been under way for more than six months, but earlier in December it had acquired a hitherto unimaginable breadth of media coverage after a police operation which had left (officially) 19 injured: among the injured had been members of an Italian television news crew. The celebratory aspect of Joop Roeland's Christmas Mass at the Hainberger Au was enhanced by an official retreat in the face of the protests. A few days earlier the government had suspended attempts to prepare the ground for the building work as part of a (still temporary) "Christmas Peace", and protester numbers at the occupied wetlands were further swollen by people taking days off from work over Christmas.
Later career
Joop Roeland was employed as "Spiritual Assistant of the Forum and Cathedral Curate" at the Cathedral in Vienna. Additionally, in 1998, he was appointed chaplain for the homo-sexually inclined.
Between 1986 and 2006 he was also priest in charge of the "Ruprechtskirche", traditionally considered to be Vienna's oldest surviving church.