Protest against church closures targets cardinal

Some 12,000 Dutch Catholics have sent a “cry of distress” petition to Pope Francis seeking his help to fend off a massive church closure programme and centralisation of parishes they claim that Cardinal Willem Eijk has planned, writes Tom Heneghan.

Cardinal Eijk, who is Archbishop of Utrecht and president of the Dutch bishops’ conference, says the protesters are misrepresenting his proposals for dealing with the inevitable closing of underused church buildings.

The cardinal alarmed Dutch Catholics in 2013 by warning that two-thirds of all Catholic churches in the Netherlands would shut by 2025 because of the country’s “drastic secularisation”. For his own archdiocese, he proposed regrouping parishes into larger units to better share out the dwindling number of priests and parishioners and falling income.