Sandro Magister on Holland

Holland was once called the showcase of the Church and now, after almost half a century of the Vatican Council, the deleterious effects of the Jesuits and liberals within the Church, the Dutch Church is almost completely dead. Nothing underscores this more than the recent death of the Dominican, Fr. Schilebeeckx.

In Holland, There's No More Room for the Child Jesus. Or Then Again, There Is


ROME, December 30, 2009 – Until half a century ago, Dutch and Flemish Catholicism seemed to be in solid shape, strong in its traditions, active in mission. One of its symbols was Fr. Jozef Damiaan de Veuster (1840-1889), an apostle to the lepers on an island in the Pacific, who was proclaimed a saint by Benedict XVI last October 11.

A few days ago, just before Christmas, another great symbol of this Catholicism died at the age of 95 in Nijmegen, Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, Flemish by birth, Dutch by choice.

However, this is a symbol not of the flourishing but of the astonishing deterioration that the Church of Flanders and of Holland has experienced over the past half century.

Schillebeeckx reflected this metamorphosis in his own life as a theologian. In the years of Vatican Council II and of the period immediately after the council, he was a star of worldwide impact, a champion of the new theology in step with the dominant culture. But then he was almost forgotten, even by the Catholics who had acclaimed him.

The disregard that fell over him went hand in hand with what was happening in the meantime in Dutch Catholicism, increasingly more forgetful of itself, increasingly secularized, increasingly in danger of disappearing.

The survey reproduced below is a snapshot of the current profile of the Catholic Church in Holland. A country in which today 41 percent of the population say that they have no religious faith, and 58 percent no longer know what Christmas is. A Church in which there are Dominicans and Jesuits who are theorizing and practicing Masses without priesthood or Christian sacrament, in which those present "consecrate" collectively, around a "table that is also open to people of different religious traditions."

All of this while at the same time, a city like Rotterdam has been thoroughly Islamized, as www.chiesa showed in a shocking article a few months ago.

The survey that follows is by Marina Corradi, and was published on December 23 in "Avvenire," the newspaper owned by the Italian bishops' conference. Its epicenter is Amsterdam.

The reportage is accompanied by an interview with Cardinal Adrianus Simonis, archbishop emeritus of Utrecht.

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Read the remainder of the article with an interview by a Liberal Prelate at the end.