19th century
Feast: January 15
A German physics teacher who couldn't get anyone interested in foreign missions — so he started his own missionary society from a rented house in the Netherlands, and it became the largest in the world.
Arnold Janssen was a high school science teacher in Germany who couldn't stop thinking about the fact that there were almost no German Catholic missionaries going to Asia. He wrote letters. He published a small mission magazine. He badgered bishops. Nobody was interested — Germany was in the middle of the Kulturkampf, and the Catholic Church was focused on surviving at home, not sending people abroad. So Arnold did it himself. In 1875, he rented a house across the border in Steyl, Netherlands (where anti-Catholic laws didn't apply), and founded the Society of the Divine Word. His first missionaries went to China in 1879. Arnold was not a natural leader — he was awkward, stubborn, obsessively detail-oriented, and hard to work with. His own priests sometimes found him exasperating. But he had an unshakeable conviction that the Gospel needed to reach every corner of the world, and he built the organizational machinery to make it happen. He founded two more congregations — the Holy Spirit Sisters and the Sister Servants of the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Adoration. By the time he died in 1909, his societies had missionaries in China, Togo, Papua New Guinea, Argentina, and the United States. Today the SVD is the largest missionary congregation in the Catholic Church.