In December of 2021, we reported on the dramatic decline of Catholicism in the Netherlands, but a recent announcement of the Amsterdam diocese showcases the dramatic extent of this decline: On September 10th, Bishop Jan Hendricks told parish leaders that 99 out of the 164 Catholic churches in the diocese—more than 60%—will have to be shut down over the next five years. Out of the remaining 65 churches, 37 will continue as ‘supporting churches’ for the next five to ten years, bringing the number of ‘central churches’ deemed fit for survival down to a total of 28, less than a fifth of churches in use today.
Vicar general Msgr. Bart Putter said that the diocese did not decide on which churches to close down, but instead hoped that local communities would take over the task of designating their preferred ‘central churches.’
“The idea is to create 28 active places of evangelization. And we hope that the parish priests and parish boards can realize that,” said Putter. “The participation has declined sharply over many years. It’s not a recent development.” Whereas church attendance among Catholics was around 80% in the 1950s, it has declined to approximately 3% of a total of 425,000 baptized Catholics today.
Bishop Hendricks noted also that “the COVID pandemic sped up the preexisting process of shrinking: older faithful churchgoers have grown even older and have sometimes stopped going to church altogether; other people may have gotten used to another routine to fill their Sunday mornings Volunteers and choirs have stopped as well.”
A preacher from the Alkmaar region of the diocese, Father Jan-Jaap van Peperstraten, predicts that church communities in the countryside will be hardest hit by the closures. “We received our first letter from the diocese concerning this in May and it didn’t come as much of a surprise. We were in fact already in the planning phase of closing down one of our rural churches with a turn-up of maybe 15 every other week,” said Fr. van Peperstraten. “We have been asked to close two churches in the next three years, and we will probably have to close one or two more in the two years following. This will be harder as there is no ‘natural process.’ Communities that still feel some vigor in them will have to be asked to wind down, and this is a difficult thing. It will take up a lot of time and energy to accompany everyone on this journey,” according to the priest.
But Fr. van Peperstraten doesn’t believe there will be widespread protests since most places are well aware of the finality of their communities. “To those ‘more in the loop,’ the change is less big,” said van Peperstraten. “We did feel this coming, and these are necessary decisions to make. Church attendance consistently halves every 10 years and has done for decades on end.”
The diocese of Amsterdam isn’t the only one struggling in the Netherlands. Roermond in the south of the Netherlands, one of the more traditional Catholic areas of the country, has been suffering from high energy prices and a shortage of priests. These conditions led to the diocese asking parishes to make accommodations, to skip Mass. The spokesman of the diocese Roermond, Matheu Bemelmans said: “Sometimes it’s simply not possible to find a priest to give a service at every church, every weekend. If there are churches with only a few visitors, we are saying: be practical and skip a week and ensure those people can follow Mass at another church.”
