Posted on 08/05/2019 7:47:32 PM PDT by marshmallow
If some fifty years ago you happened to find yourself in one of the small villages in the Dutch countryside, you could hardly get lost. The only thing you needed to do was look up, find the church tower and you would always find your way back. Because the church - literally - was at the heart of the village.
In the rural communities the church was a central point of life as well. Sunday Mass, the Catholic feast days, weddings and funerals: The church was the place where everyone met each other and shared the day’s news. The parish priest, as well as other volunteers from the church, regularly visited the elderly, and the concerts the church choir gave were attended by many of the villagers.
Things have changed
In many Dutch villages the church can still be found at the heart of the village, the local pub still has many visitors, and in and around the Catholic primary school the voices of playing children can still be heard. But if you speak to the villagers, you quickly notice that many of their communities have changed rapidly over the past decade.
No longer is the church the central meeting place of the community. It has often even closed its doors, due to the declining number of worshipers. Those who are still attending church are usually old; the younger generation doesn’t feel the need to go to Sunday Mass anymore.
In the golden age of Dutch Catholicism the situation was completely different. In the 1960s, 55 percent of 2.7 million Dutch Catholics still went to Mass regularly, according to the Dutch research center KASKI.
The number of worshipers has been steadily declining since then. In the year 2000 on average 439,000 Catholics went to church during the weekend. In 2017, that.....
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Or dog sanctuaries ; )
Roman Catholicism was much smaller than Protestantism in the Netherlands.
too late. europe will experience a boom in mosques due to immigration and demographics. Muslims reproduce more than traditional europeans and they group together which is conducive to operating a local mosque,.
I lived in the Netherlands for a decade. The reason for the decline in Christianity in large part relates to WW 1 and WW2, especially the later. Before the Nazi invasion, church leaders preached that God would honor their neutrality and protect them from harm. When Germany invaded and destroyed the country, many felt that it proved God did not exist. The further revelation of the death camps just seems to confirm atheism to many. (This reason was told to me by an elderly Dutch woman.)
Add to these experiences the church’s acceptance of higher criticism of the Bible and Darwin’s theory of evolution - just really what is the point of attending church? (This is a rhetorical question, btw.)
Pederasty.
That’s the elephant in the room with Catholicism and will continue to be until the issue is resolved.
You’d have to have a hole in your head to let your kids accept guidance from people who aren’t clear on whether raping children is right or wrong.
Holland’s issues with Christianity go back centuries; before the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts they traveled to Holland, and left there because of the liberalism (they were puritans to some degree, and feared assimilating into the liberal Dutch culture).
This same dynamic is occurring in the US (also never a Catholic country); mega-churches and Hispanic storefront churches are springing up, but the infrastructure of the Catholic Church is contracting. Why maintain old buildings if there are fewer people every week - and fewer priests to staff them?
Dutch culture at the time of the Pilgrims was hardly liberal! At least, if we’re using the same meaning of the word. Yes, they were tolerant of various Christian groups, but not heretics. However, the Pilgrims were separatists and wanted to live in a culture that was not “worldly” by their view of the Bible. While they appreciated the freedom the Dutch government gave them, they did not approve of the freedom it gave others who they did not approve. Probably even more importantly, the Pilgrim fathers were alarmed that their children were speaking Dutch more fluently than English. They wanted their children to retain their English language and heritage.
Don’t underestimate the role The Holocaust had in turning many against religion.
I don’t! That was the main point of my original post.
The Dutch were liberal by 17th century standards.
True, the Pilgrims were afraid of losing their English culture as the children “became Dutch”.
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