Franz Jozef van Beeck

Who was Franz Jozef van Beeck?

Frans Jozef Van Beeck or Franz Jozef van Beeck, also known as Joep van Beeck, was a Dutch author and Christian theologian who was also a prominent priest of the Society of Jesus.

Born in Helmond, Netherlands, he entered the Jesuit religious order in 1948 after studies at the Jesuit-run Aloysius College in The Hague. He received a doctorate in English from the University of Amsterdam in 1961 and was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1963. From 1968 to 1985, Van Beeck taught theology at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts. He then moved to Loyola University Chicago in Chicago, Illinois where he served as John Cardinal Cody Professor of Theology until his retirement in 2002. From 2006 until his death, he resided in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Van Beeck wrote hundreds of thousands of pages of letters, treatises and books used today in Christian colleges and universities throughout the world. His most famous theological work is an ambitious series of six books called God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology.

Some of his most controversial works considered the issues arising from World War II.