Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Georg Baetzing –former German bishops' conference presidents
Posted on 03/25/2026 12:59:30 PM PDT by ebb tide
Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Georg Baetzing –former German bishops' conference presidents
Dutch Bishop Roberts Mutsaerts has warned the Catholic Church in Germany that it will suffer a collapse like the Church in the Netherlands if its continues with the heretical Synodal Way.
In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews journalist Andreas Wailzer, Bishop Mutsaerts, the auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, recalled how the Dutch Church initiated a heterodox reform project after the Second Vatican Council that led to a total collapse in faith and church attendance.
He said he grew up in Tilburg in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the diocese of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 97 percent of inhabitants were Catholics, and of those, 96 percent attended Mass every Sunday.
However, after the Second Vatican Council, the Netherlands went ”from being the most well-behaved kid in the class… to the most rebellious kid in the class who wanted to reform the Universal Church.”
Biahop Mutsaerts said that people, including inside the hierarchy of the Church, were occupied with “ideals of the sixties,” like so-called sexual liberation, and wanted to do “away with rules, away with authority.”
In 1966, the Dutch bishops published the heterodox “Dutch catechism,” which contained doctrinally ambiguous formulations on key topics like original sin, the divinity of Christ, the nature of the Church, and salvation. The Vatican examined it and ordered several corrections and clarifications to be made, but the original version continued to circulate in multiple languages.
Bishop Mutsaerts said the Dutch “reformers” would only be advised by “progressive theologians” like the infamous liberal Belgian priest Edward Schillebeeckx.
Schillebeeckx served as the personal advisor of Cardinal Jan Alfrink, the archbishop of Utrecht at the time. Alfrink openly called for the abolition of mandatory priestly celibacy and other heterodox reforms that he claimed followed from the Second Vatican Council. He and the other Dutch bishops hosted the local Pastoral Council of the Dutch Church Province in Noordwijkerhout from 1968 to 1970, during which they sought to formalize their ideas.
“It’s a bit similar to what is happening now in Germany with this Synodal Way,” Mutsaerts told LifeSiteNews. “The same topics, the same views."
“People began to relativize the existence of objective truth. And that’s the main thing in the whole story,” the bishop said.
The Dutch bishop also recalled that ”the liturgy was disastrous” with liturgical “innovations” cropping up everywhere. He also criticized the removal of altar rails and the priest offering the Holy Mass facing the people instead of ad orientem.
Mutsaerts said that Cardinal Alfrink was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul VI and was finally asked to resign.
However, the damage was already done, and the progressive “reform project” in the Netherlands led to a total collapse in the practice of the faith.
“Confession rates went down from 90% to less than 10 in in one or two years,” Mutsaerts said. The bishop also noted that, today, only about two percent of Catholics in the Netherlands attend Mass on Sunday.
“We wanted to be so pleasing [to] society that we lost our identity. And that was the main problem in the Netherlands. There was no difference anywhere between Catholic views and views in society,” the bishop said.
However, the Vatican did react to the debacle, and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI put orthodox men into positions of authority, leading to a conservative episcopate in the Netherlands today, which includes Bishop Mutsaerts and Cardinal Willem Eijk, who have both publicly defended traditional Catholic teaching on matters like marriage and sexuality.
“I hope we are the first to start with a disastrous evolution, but maybe we are the first to hit rock bottom so it can go up again,” the auxiliary bishop of ‘s-Hertogenbosch said. “And some signs are already there. Young people, very amazing, who show up in our churches everywhere. The numbers are small, but something’s happening.”
He warned the hierarchy in Germany that they are going down the same path as the Netherlands did, and the results will be ”disastrous.”
READ: Catholic Church in Germany lost more than 500k members, had only 25 priestly ordinations in 2025
”So why go on with that?” he asked. “For us, it’s really hard to understand this liberal way they are going… it never works out for the good.”
“We have to be clear, and that was a bit of a problem with the former papacy [of Pope Francis]. The confusion and the division, and that’s what I see now in Germany as well. It’s very confusing. Only a few bishops who actually stand up for what is regular Catholic, and they call them ‘conservative’… it’s just regular Catholic.”
”I don’t understand most of the German bishops, because before Pope Francis, you never heard those statements,” he noted. “You never heard this language. And then Pope Francis came, things were shifting.”
Asked about whether the German bishops who promote heretical views should be asked to resign by the Vatican, he replied, “Well, either you’re Catholic or not. You give a good example or not. You are clear or not. And if you are not, please step down.”
Despite the collapse in the Netherlands, Bishop Mutsearts said he sees hopeful signs, as young people are increasingly interested in the Catholic faith.
“They’re very young, a lot of them high school kids… and for some reason, the big majority of them are boys, young men,” he stated.
“The numbers are small, but they are there, there’s a start, and there’s change. I did not see that coming a few years ago.”
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In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews journalist Andreas Wailzer, Bishop Mutsaerts, the auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, recalled how the Dutch Church initiated a heterodox reform project after the Second Vatican Council that led to a total collapse in faith and church attendance.
He said he grew up in Tilburg in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the diocese of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 97 percent of inhabitants were Catholics, and of those, 96 percent attended Mass every Sunday.
However, after the Second Vatican Council, the Netherlands went ”from being the most well-behaved kid in the class… to the most rebellious kid in the class who wanted to reform the Universal Church.”
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