Jan Pieter Schotte
Roman Catholic cardinal (1928–2005)

Jan Pieter Schotte (29 April 1928 – 10 January 2005) was a Belgian cardinal and an official of the Roman Curia.
Biography
He was born on 29 April 1928 in the town of Beveren-Leie (now a part of Waregem) in the province of West Flanders. He entered the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (CICM Missionaries) in 1946. He was ordained a priest in 1952. From 1953 to 1956 he studied canon law at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and from 1962 to 1963 at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. From 1955 to 1962, he was professor of canon law at the CICM theological seminary in Leuven and from 1957 to 1962 assistant professor at the Higher Institute of Religious Sciences, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He was vice-rector of the CICM theological seminary in Leuven from 1956 to 1962. In 1963, he became rector of the Immaculate Heart mission seminary in Washington, DC, where he served until 1966. In 1967, he came to Rome as General Secretary of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a post he held until 1972.
Jan Schotte became a bishop in 1984 and an archbishop in 1985. On 26 November 1994 he was given the red hat of cardinal.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jan Pieter Schotte” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.