THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE NETHERLANDS

by Jozef Wissink,  22 September 2020

After the second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church in the Netherlands was world news for a while: the progressives held the upper hand, the conservatives looked for support in Rome and got it. At the moment there is hardly any talk about the religion of the Netherlands. What happened? How are things now?

The historical background

The Catholic Church in the Netherlands was a minority Church in our country. It survived the Reformation: sustained by Rome and by priests trained in Cologne and Louvain. On the whole, the community was not persecuted harshly. In a city like Amsterdam Catholics had a hidden church in the loft of a canal house, which was quite well known and where Catholics could continue their religious life by paying a bribe. After 1813 it was possible to perform the eucharist publicly again. Since 1853 bishops, instead of vicar apostolics, have been appointed again and the rebuilding of the community was diligently taken in hand.

The Catholic Church organized itself strongly with a large number of its own social organizations and thus became one religious ‘compartment’ among other religious compartments. People lived in their own cubicle strongly isolated from the rest of the people, going to Catholic schools, buying from Catholic grocers, having their haircut done by Catholic hairdressers, you get the picture.

Internally our Church took the shape of ‘ultramontane mass Catholicism’, as was the case in Belgium, Poland, Spain and Italy. The difference with these countries was that the whole nation was not Catholic, as was the case in the other countries mentioned, the similarity was that the Catholic compartment was so well isolated that one automatically stayed Catholic because the idea that one could choose differently did not come up in the minds of ordinary people.

When Bishop Woytila, the later Pope John-Paul II, ​​visited the Netherlands in 1947, he admired the near-perfect organization, but noticed less attention was paid to personal spiritual preference: even piety was organized. The Catholic system was clearly authoritarian.

This whole system collapsed after Vatican II. Slowly in some areas, vehemently in others. A number of factors can be cited as explanations.

• The first is that until 1960 so much pressure had built up in the ‘boiler’ because of the authoritarian rule that at the slightest change in the system the boiler exploded. People wanted reform of the system and they wanted it swiftly and totally. Anyone who now reads the texts from the sixties and seventies is struck by the enormous impatience.
• A second factor is that Catholic emancipation in the Netherlands then reached its completion: during the German occupation of the Second World War, Protestant, socialist, liberal and Catholic people had joined up in the resistance. It resulted in rapprochement and mutual respect. When the bishops wanted to close the ‘compartment’ again after the war, that was no longer possible.
• A third factor was that the whole culture was also shifting: the economy was increasingly part of the world market, society was increasingly characterized by the process of individualization. By the latter I do not mean that people started to live more on their own or became more selfish, but that society increasingly asked of each individual that he or she would take responsibility for their own choices and would no longer hide behind collective quantities. Catholics had lost out on that within the Catholic system. This gave them a certain defenselessness with regard to cultural innovations: they floated on the great current.
• Finally, mention should be made of the great polarization that dominated our church after 1968: the strong left and right wing fought each other and received all the attention internally and externally. The large middle group tried to start the conversation between the wings and to pass their faith on to a new generation as best they could. That turned out to be less and less successful. Even as the focus on personal religiosity grew again, the Catholic Church hardly came into the picture as a possible source. In practice only contemplative monasteries were an exception.

Rome has intervened harshly in our Church through episcopal appointments. In most dioceses the intellectual side of priestly training had been entrusted to academic theological faculties. Now newly appointed traditional bishops established their own seminaries. The theological faculties also trained lay people, who were accepted by most bishops as ‘pastoral workers’ who ministered in parishes. As a result, for the students of the priesthood celibacy could become a bit more of a separate choice in the sense that the choice not to choose the path of celibacy did not immediately mean that pastoral care also disappeared completely from view. Women also functioned in public liturgies as the leader of Word and Communion services, when the priest was missing on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the church has shrunk dramatically and the age structure of the believers is alarming. Because the Church has to support itself financially, parish churches have to be closed regularly. The current archbishop, who belongs to the right flank of the church and delivered a harsh speech against Pope Francis at the bishops’ synod on marriage and the family, even pursues an active church closure policy. He wants to designate one Eucharistic center within a bundle of merged parishes, appoint a priest there, force people to these Eucharistic centers. It is suspected that he also wants to get rid of lay pastoral workers. He himself says that he is forced to do this because of financial problems. Because people refuse to be forced, this further promotes their exodus from the Church. But that just proves in the eyes of the archbishop that they weren’t already good believers. The good news is that under Pope Francis some bishops have been appointed who have a more pastoral heart.

Progressives and Conservatives

The lines of conflict between right and left in the Church still exist, insofar as a number of bishops have been trained in seminaries who turned against the progressive line and who are now carrying out the restoration program presented to them as students as the ideal. Some of those, who now see this line as a dead end, are conforming a little more to the pastoral demands of their believers than they did before.

But progressives can also become conservative in their own way. I was once a member of a dialogue committee whose mission was to initiate fruitful discussions between conservative and progressive groups in the Church. As a committee we decided that we did not believe in argumentative debates. So we held the meetings between the two wings in the presence of groups of young people and a number of searchers who were looking for spiritual nourishment in the Catholic tradition. It turned out that the two groups were so obsessed with each other that the young people withdrew in sheer despair. They had not experienced the 1960s and 1970s and had no interest in their problems. We then refrained from allowing even more young people to be deterred by this kind of dialogue.

A number of progressive Catholics have joined grassroots communities, that is, free groups, which have placed themselves outside the responsibility of the bishop. Sometimes the leader is a married priest, sometimes a pastoral worker who presides over what is called “the service of word and table” and actually intends it to be a celebration of the Eucharist. Some of them are very creative and publish many new liturgical songs and solid Biblical sermons. Unfortunately, we also see there that it has not been possible to introduce the tradition to the current younger generation, so that aging groups predominate there too.

Signs of hope

The foregoing may sound like a lament. That is not the intention. I think that ‘mass Catholicism’ [= ‘bulge Catholicism’] belonged to past conditions as they had developed in our country. Now that the Church has become an elective Church, meaning that the members remain or become members on the basis of their own choice, the cloak of ‘mass Catholicism’ has become too large. The loss may be painful, but more important is whether we succeed to form vital communities of faith in a new kind of Church. These will be smaller, but can be crucial to our Church and our society by keeping old questions about the mystery of God open, and also by being open to questioning faith itself, such as those experienced by people outside and even inside the Church,  and by showing solidarity with people in need.

It is an interesting phenomenon that a Charity has been set up in our country: Schuldhulpmaatje which means “Your-buddy-in-debt”, which aims to train volunteers to become ‘buddies’/’helpers’ for people who have fallen into debt. In many towns and villages, large and small, local Churches have declared themselves prepared to promote the cause and recruit volunteers for this training, who then expand the work and bring in fellow volunteers. Catholic parishes and Protestant congregations have found that many volunteers have come forward from their midst who have not been found willing to take on other tasks and who sometimes do not even participate very actively in liturgical functions. For some, the discovery that this too belongs to Church and faith has opened the door to being part of the community.

We see that the search for a personal spiritual life and meditation have now started to live stronger again. This is found among Catholics, Protestants as well as others who have not been brought up as Christians, or hardly so. Monasteries and other religious communities are particularly popular in the Catholic domain. If we consider the number of entries into monasteries and orders, we notice that the numbers are not very large, but not as small as during the previous twenty years. What is striking is the number of people either entering from the Protestant side or beginning entry with baptism. The theological faculty of Tilburg University, where I myself was privileged to teach as a theologian, still has a larger number of students than one might expect based on the statistics of church attendance.

There are also shifts in ecumenical relationships between Churches. Ecumenism really took off after Vatican II: the Churches discovered the positive aspects of each other with joy and so started to do more and more together. Because the Protestants wholeheartedly invited the Catholics to their celebration of the Lord’s Supper and many Catholics wholeheartedly accepted, also because people were getting closer to each other theologically, the participation of Protestants in eucharist and communion became more and more acceptable on the Catholic side as well. Thus, ecumenism also became a controversial issue in the struggle between right and left. Now however most of the fighters have grown tired. On the whole, relations have remained good: in many places adult catechesis is conducted jointly. And a new ecumenism is opening up at the diaconal level, now that the evangelical churches are also discovering that they lack a lot of know-how in this area and are opening up to a more fruitful cooperation. In theology, there has been a long-standing collaboration between Catholic and Protestant theologians. We see a parallel on the pastoral side. The Churches face the same decline and seek support from each other.

Jozef Wissink is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology at the University of Tilburg and Academic Associate at the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research.

Translation into English by John Wijngaards