Observations and lessons from a “poor Church in a rich country.”

Despite its optimistic-sounding title, reading God Is Alive in Holland, a short book-length interview with Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht and Primate of the Netherlands, conducted by the Italian journalist Andrea Galli, is a rather sobering and often painful experience. However, it does offer cautious hope that a small but infectiously zealous new Church can emerge in the West from the rubble of the secularist turmoil of the last half-century. Anyone concerned about the future of the Catholic faith in the Northern Hemisphere should urgently read this book to learn from the mistakes of the Dutch and ponder how to rebuild Christianitas.

At the avant-garde of secularism

With the exceptions of post-communist societies subjected to decades of Marxist-Leninist atheist propaganda (in the Czech Republic, Estonia, and the lands making up the former German Democratic Republic), perhaps no European nation is as secularized as the Netherlands. In a 2013 interview with Vatican Radio (cited in Edward Pentin’s book The Next Pope, which profiles the Dutch prelate as one of more than a dozen pababili), Cardinal Eijk stated that the proportion of Dutch Catholics attending Mass plunged from 90 percent in the 1950s to less than 5 percent a decade ago.

Whereas, in my experience, most Czechs are apathetic about religion, the dominant Dutch attitude towards God and the Church is hostility. This was on full display during Pope St. John Paul II’s visit to the Netherlands in 1985. Whereas John Paul II’s charisma and respect for and knowledge of local cultures evoked widespread enthusiasm even in countries with tiny Catholic populations such as Greece, Israel, and Japan, turnout at papal events was very poor in Holland, a nation that, like Germany, was historically home to a mixed Catholic-Protestant society. In Utrecht, protestors threw rotten eggs and smoke bombs at the popemobile, chanting: “Kill the pope!” Meanwhile, a song titled “Popie Jopie” (“buffoon” in Dutch) mocking St. John Paul II was a Top Forty hit in the Netherlands.

Not only have the Dutch lost their faith in the past seventy years; they have also stood at the avant-garde of rejecting social taboos and Judeo-Christian ethics through legislation. In 2001, the Netherlands became the first nation in the world to legalize “same-sex marriage,” and a year later the first to decriminalize euthanasia. And apart from its numerous visionary painters, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, Holland is perhaps most synonymous with its legal tolerance of recreational cannabis use.

What we can learn from the Dutch

So, why does the Netherlands deserve our attention? After all, “same-sex marriage” has long been legal in all fifty states and in much of Europe (most recently, Greece became the first traditionally Orthodox Christian society to redefine marriage). In almost half of all American states, recreational cannabis is permitted; and while the spread of legal assisted suicide is slower, it is nevertheless noticeable. Meanwhile, a growing number of nations in Latin America, the demographic center of twenty-first century Catholicism, are also legalizing abortion on demand and same-sex “marriage.”

It is precisely because the Dutch have been trailblazers in embracing aggressive secularism that we have much to learn from them. Much of God Is Alive in Holland is very unpleasant reading. The interview starts with Cardinal Eijk discussing the absolute necessity of closing parishes in his archdiocese. Meanwhile, the reader is introduced to many depressing statistics: in 2016, less than a third of the Dutch professed any religion, down from 43 percent in 2002. Between 2003 and 2015, the number of Dutch Catholics attending Mass more than halved, standing at just 186,000 in a country of 17.5 million. Of the few Dutch still claiming to be Catholic, less than half bother to baptize their children.

Because the legalization of euthanasia and “soft drugs” has not progressed as rapidly in other nations, it is worth learning from Dutch hindsight. Cardinal Eijk notes how the acceptance of voluntary assisted suicide (he cites a 2005 survey of Dutch doctors in which only 15 percent were opposed to performing euthanasia) is quickly leading towards a push towards legalizing the involuntary euthanasia of patients with dementia and children with disabilities.

Meanwhile, the Dutch experience demolishes the balderdash we often hear in the mainstream media about how the legalization of recreational marijuana will stop drug trafficking, and that smoking a joint is about as harmful as drinking a glass of chardonnay with dinner. Cardinal Eijk notes that eventually the marijuana smoker builds up tolerance to THC and needs something stronger, leading to the explosion of ecstasy and crystal meth use in Holland. Meanwhile, Mexican drug traffickers often get their supplies in the Netherlands.

A radical Christian witness

It is easy to admire the courageous steadfastness of Catholics who refuse to renounce their faith amidst tortures and the real threat of death under communist dictatorships or at the hands of Islamicist radicals in the present-day Middle East or parts of Africa. Cardinal Eijk’s life story, however, demonstrates that being a faithful Catholic in the modern-day West can be a kind of social dry martyrdom.

Born to a Catholic mother and formerly Baptist, rabidly atheist father in a village on the outskirts of Amsterdam, Eijk studied medicine in the 1970s, the decade when the largest number of Dutch rejected their faith. Due to his opposition to abortion and euthanasia, he was ostracized by the medical community and his own classmates (he recalls that only one other medical student in his course was opposed to abortion); he was told in no uncertain terms by his professors that it would be difficult for him to find employment as a physician (he did, however, get a job at the university hospital). Due to his medical background, Eijk has become a major leader of global Catholicism in defending of the Church’s teachings on bioethics.

Upon completion of his medical degree, Eijk entered the seminary. Eijk’s own father, at that point his only parent as his mother had recently died of cancer, hated the Church so much that he did not speak to him for three years and refused to let him spend the holidays at his own family home.

In other Western nations, the disdain for the faith may not be as intense as in the Netherlands and the statistics regarding religious practice not as appalling, but they are all moving, at different speeds, in that direction.

When the salt loses its taste

Through Galli’s interview with Cardinal Eijk, Catholics in other parts of the world can learn from the Netherlands’ mistakes and ponder how to rekindle faith.

In explaining why the collapse of faith in the Netherlands was so steep, Eijk describes how, prior to the 1960s, the Church was strong as an institution, but its members’ faith was weak. In those days, many Dutch youths attended Catholic schools or scouting and athletic associations but were poorly catechized. Eijk quotes the observations of the young Karol Wojtyła. When the future pope visited the Netherlands in the late 1940s, he had the impression that although the Church there was strong, it was treated as a purely social institution.

Meanwhile, as the sexual revolution of the 1960s wreaked havoc across the West, the Dutch Church had myopically tried to accommodate the timeless truths of Scripture to changing social norms. Indeed, the Dutch bishops were at the forefront of opposition within the Church to St. Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae. Eijk cites the example of a Franciscan catechist who tried to describe Jesus’ miracles using rationalist, materialist explanations, a kind of Thomas Jefferson-style exegesis, so as not to sound superstitious and backwards. When Dutch Catholics did not learn the dogmas of the faith from their own shepherds, how could they be expected to stand up for what is unpopular yet true?

A Dutch Catholic Phoenix?

God Is Alive in Holland begins with a preface in which interviewer Andrea Galli chronicles his visit to Utrecht. He laments how difficult it was to find a Catholic Mass, unsurprising given the tremendous number of church closures in the country. Yet he ultimately found a Latin Mass at the Church of St. Willibrord, which he writes many consider to be the most beautiful in the Netherlands. Attendance at the Mass was not jaw-dropping, but Galli did admire the zeal of the “few dozen people deep in prayer with their bilingual Mass-book, some women with their heads covered and a number of young couples.”

It can be inferred that this could be the future of the Church in not only the Netherlands, but throughout the West: a small group of believers who are nevertheless faithful to the Gospels. In his evaluation of the present-day Netherlands, Eijk notes that the few Dutch Catholics who still practice their faith are orthodox. While the Netherlands has few seminarians, they represent strong vocations and are loyal to Rome. Meanwhile, the removal of religious education from Dutch schools has allowed greater quality control. When young Dutch Catholics are preparing for the sacraments of penance, First Holy Communion, and confirmation in parishes, they do not receive a watered-down parody of the faith, as they had for decades, but the real thing.

Galli calls the Church in the Netherlands a “poor Church in a rich country.” Indeed, as the example of neighboring Germany shows, material wealth often impoverishes the Church. Forced to focus less on the matters of this world, the Dutch Church adopted a Christ-like attitude. Undoubtedly, clerical arrogance was one reason for sexual abuse in the priesthood and especially its coverup. Cardinal Eijk notes that the new, materially poor Church has been responsive and compassionate towards victims, and when an analogous crisis erupted among Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Dutch Minister of Justice and Security pointed towards the Dutch Catholic Church as a model for dealing with this problem.

Additional promising factors are the 500 or so Dutch who convert to Catholicism each year, as well as Catholic immigrants, primarily from Poland, Vietnam, and the Middle East. Cardinal Eijk notes that, contrary to the popular perception of the Netherlands as a caliphate in the making, half of immigrants to the country are Christian. In the Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam, immigrants make up three in five Catholics. While many Catholics across the West have embraced nativist populist movements, Eijk’s words are a reminder that immigration can be a blessing, including for the Church.

The reality of a small but vibrant Church, however, invites the temptation of an elitist, hermetic institution, which is contrary to Jesus’ message to spread to Good Word to all. However, in a recent interview with Poland’s Catholic Information Agency, Cardinal Eijk said that the future of the Church is “creative communities” and that he has embarked on a program of converting churches into “missionary parishes,” although he did not specify the details. If the Netherlands was at the forefront of aggressive secularism in the twentieth century, perhaps it could become a leader of the new evangelization in the twenty-first.

God Is Alive in Holland is as much about the Netherlands as it is about our entire civilization’s sorry state. Reading it can be instructive in helping to avoid the mistakes of the Dutch and understanding how to rebuild a Catholic culture. In Cardinal Eijk’s Netherlands, the Church is much like in the first three centuries of Christianity: a hated, small, and persecuted minority. Eventually, however, the flame of the faith spread.

Cardinal Eijk and Andrea Galli’s book gives us hope that this may happen, but only through our own courageous witness and lack of accommodation to the ephemeral, tempting distortions of the truth we encounter daily.

God Is Alive in Holland
Willem Jacobus Cardinal Eijk with Andrea Galli
Gracewing, 2022
Paperback, 144 pages