Posted on 09/18/2018 2:20:30 AM PDT by Salman
The Catholic Church is rapidly disappearing from the Netherlands. Over ten years the entire archdiocese of Utrecht will probably only consist of 10 to 15 churches that still hold the Eucharistic celebrations, compared to the current 280 churches, Archbishop Wim Eijk said in an interview with the Gelderlander.
According to Eijk, 10 percent of the parishes in his diocese are actually bankrupt, 10 percent are still rich and the other 80 percent are somewhere in between. The aging Catholic population and a rapid decline in church attendance is causing a problematic situation. Every year catholic church attendance decreases by 5 to 6 percent. And fewer and fewer people support their church financially.
Officially the Netherlands has 3.5 million Catholic residents, but the vast majority of them never go to church, the Archbishop said. On average 173,500 people attend a Catholic church over the weekend, according to figures from the Nijmegen institute Kaski. "The church is not closed by people who are still coming or by me, but by those who stay away and do not contribute anymore", Eijk said to the newspaper.
One big problem is the high maintenance costs of the large, monumental churches. Keeping them open is becoming unaffordable.
Four years ago Eijk predicted that by 2028 there will only be 20 or 30 parishes left in the Utrecht diocese, the largest diocese in the Netherlands in terms of area. He now says that expectation was too positive. He believes that parishes will have to merge on a large scale.
Growing group of young Salafists increasingly isolated from society: report
There is a growing group of young salafists in the Netherlands who politicians can't get a grip on, according to a study by Mohammad Nazar Soroush at Tilburg University, for which he is receiving his doctorate, NOS reports.
Nazar Soroush studied salafist Muslims in the Netherlands for 15 years. He visited 64 religious meetings over the past three years, and listened and watched young salafists at mosques, foundations and leisure activities. Salafists are Muslims who try to live as strictly as possible to the authentic, pure form of Islam.
The young salafists seek the protection of a closed community, that has traits of a family, Nazar Soroush said. What struck the researcher, was how negative the young people are about the world outside theirs. "They can not spend time with old friends, or people who are not their ideological brothers", he said to NOS. "A girl asked what she should say to a colleague who says salam aleikum when she comes in. The answer: do not say 'As-salamu alaikum' (peace be upon you) but 'Aleikum' (upon you), because the colleague as non-Muslim is not worthy of peace."
...
And on that last, we are told we must COEXIST!
they are foreign funded colonists. Imperial Islam is on the rise.
The church that advances the cause of Islam will not retain or attract Christians.
The way to deal with salafists is to kill them before they kill you.
And Islam feeds off the carcass of dead institutionalized "Christianity," as it has in the past.
So nice to be on this side of the pond where we Yanks can listen to distant Euroweenies lecturing us about our “lax gun laws” while their society is being raped by hordes of hostile Muslim invaders.
Meanwhile, muzzies in our midst are confronted with hordes of armed “infidels” with CCW’s who regard Islam as the enemy. They cry unto Allah; a buck Muslim assaulting a woman here could wind up dead and it’s just not fair.
And that is exactly why the Byzantine Empire fell to these Mohammedan workers of iniquity. As a consequence, the Ottomans ruled the eastern Europeans as if they were dogs, and mongrels at that. The cost of phony religion that existed only in dhimmitude until 1920s.
Now Turkey is reviving that paradigm because of the lack of any effective resistance against it. So much for Papal "peace" with persecutors and paedophiles.
Both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Western Europe are so far left-wing that they are essentially a branch of the Socialist or Communist parties. They are all about helping the invaders and trying to guilt people into supported a variety of charities, to the detriment of their own flocks and national culture. One reason people don’t attend church anymore is because it is more about leftist politics than anything spiritual..and what is spiritual is generally watered-down feelgoodism. The Orthodox Church is growing however (which isn’t mentioned here), but can never outpace the dominance of Islam. Soon enough West European cathedrals will have muezzins calling from the towers, replacing the ancient church bells. Western Europe is fast committing suicide, and is largely indifferent about it.
By the time the Dutch realize than Islam is not preferable to anything, there may not be enough of them left to do anything about it.
Catholic church doesn’t practice what they preach. The Pope has thrown out the Bible. If you are a member of the clergy it is ok to abuse people.
Well maybe the Catholic church in the Netherlands would be in better shape financially if they had quit raping boys a bit earlier.
(The Vatican claims they stopped in 2011)
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2018-09/netherlands-bishops-conference-report-abuse.html
The piece says there are 3.5 million catholics with 173 k actually attending mass.
How many protestants?
Has the reformation prevailed?
Good.
Christianity on the whole is declining in the Netherlands.
As of 2015, over half the county claims no religious affiliation.
Per those same statistics, Protestantism has declined from about 60% in the mid-20th century, to about 20% now, less than the number of those claiming Catholic affiliation.
The largest Protestant denomination, the PKN, embraces religious “pluralism”; 42% of members are non-theist, and 1 out of 6 clergymen are agnostic or atheist.
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