Luc. van der Linden, O. Carm. — a Carmelite father (Ordo Carmelitarum, Order of Carmelites) — was the Dutch Catholic missionary author who, in 1939, published Bij het derde eeuwfeest van de martelaren van Atjeh (1138–1938) in Het Missiewerk (The Mission Work), No. 4, p. 186 e.v., commemorating the third centenary of the Catholic missionary martyrs of Atjeh. The article is recorded twice in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940): as No. 581 in the Sumatra chapter and as No. 1059 in the Sumatra Addenda, the latter giving the author’s name in the fuller form Linden O. CARM., LUC. VAN DER.
The Atjeh martyrs commemoration
Van der Linden’s article, published in 1939 in Het Missiewerk — the principal Dutch Catholic missionary journal — commemorated the derde eeuwfeest (third centenary) of the martelaren van Atjeh, the martyrs of Atjeh. The article’s title dates the martyrdom to the period 1138–1938, a chronology that, on its face, presents a discrepancy (a third centenary counted from 1138 would fall in 1438, not 1938), and that is most plausibly an error in Van Meurs’s survey for an intended base date of 1538 or 1638. The martyrs commemorated are, in the context of a Catholic missionary journal, the Catholic missionaries or converts who suffered martyrdom in Atjeh in the period of early Christian missionary contact with the sultanate — the 16th and 17th centuries, the period treated in the same year by C. Wessels in Uit de missiegebieden van Sumatra: Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw (No. 652 of the same survey).
The Carmelite order and the Atjeh mission
The O. Carm. suffix — Ordo Carmelitarum, the Order of Carmelites — identifies van der Linden as a member of the Carmelite order, one of the mendicant orders of the Catholic Church. The Carmelites, like the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Capuchins, were active in the Dutch Catholic missionary enterprise in the Netherlands Indies, and the commemoration of the Atjeh martyrs in a Carmelite author’s article reflects the order’s interest in the martyrology of the Indies mission fields. The Catholic mission to Atjeh — treated in the corpus under Catholic mission in Aceh — was a minor but persistent strand of the 16th- and 17th-century missionary effort, and the martyrs commemorated by van der Linden belong to that strand.
Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht
Van der Linden’s article is recorded twice in Van Meurs’s survey: as No. 581 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) and as No. 1059 in the Sumatra Addenda (Nos. 1056–1062). The Addenda entry gives the author’s name in the fuller form Linden O. CARM., LUC. VAN DER, with the order suffix, and confirms the Carmelite affiliation. The double recording reflects the bibliographic practice of including, in the Addenda, items that had appeared in the preceding year but had not been recorded in the previous survey.
Significance
For AcehWiki, Luc. van der Linden is significant as the Carmelite author of the 1939 commemoration of the Atjeh martyrs — a document of Dutch Catholic missionary historiography on Atjeh, and a source for the Catholic martyrology of the 16th- and 17th-century mission field. His article complements the Wessels historical survey of Atjeh in the 16th and 17th centuries (No. 652 of the same survey), and it places the Catholic missionary tradition alongside the Protestant and the secular-colonial scholarly traditions represented in the corpus. The Carmelite identification of the author is itself a contribution to the mapping of the Dutch missionary orders’ engagement with Atjeh.
See Also
- Bij het derde eeuwfeest van de martelaren van Atjeh (1138-1938)
- Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (Van Meurs, 1940)
- H. van Meurs
- Uit de missiegebieden van Sumatra: Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw (Wessels, 1939)
- C. Wessels
- Catholic mission in Aceh
- Acheh
- 1938
- 1939
- 1940
Source
Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 581; and Addenda, No. 1059. Citing: Luc. van der Linden, “Bij het derde eeuwfeest van de martelaren van Atjeh (1138–1938),” Het Missiewerk, No. 4 (1939), p. 186 e.v.