RECIPIENT OF THE LETTERS

Msgr. Anton de Waal

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Anton de Waal, eldest of fifteen children, was born on May 5, 1837 in Emmerich, Niederrhein, Germany. After attending grammar school in his hometown, he began his theological studies in Münster, where he was ordained a priest in 1862. De Waal was not assigned to the ordinary care of souls; he was instead entrusted with teaching and theological study. In 1869, he was promoted to Doctor of Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. During the time De Waal lived in Rome (1868), he was both at the Church of the Soul and at the Collegio Camposanto Teutonico, of which he became rector in 1873. He was a model priest, totally dedicated to the service of the Church and committed to ecclesiastic sciences. He took special care in founding the theological faculty of the German priests' college; here the search for places of worship was very important to him. Thanks to him, the catacombs of Rome were also made accessible to people in new areas and with increased security measures.

 

De Waal came into contact with the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother in 1885, when Fr. Jordan, on his summer trip to Germany, asked him to take care of the sisters' temporal affairs for that year and to look for a larger house for them. In the autumn of that year, this task was assigned to Cardinal Parocchi at the request of Sr. Scholastica.  As administrator of the sisters’ temporal goods, the latter dealt with the purchase of the house at Borgo S. Spirito 41, and with some lawsuits regarding property issues in 1887, with the sisters living next door. Msgr. de Waal was one of the major benefactors of the sisters' community in Rome, both for their material and spiritual needs. 

He died of a brain seizure at the age of eighty, on February 23, 1917 and was buried in Rome in the Teutonic Cemetery.