Dutch Catholics are protesting plans to close Utrecht's historic St Catherine's cathedral, which is to be put up for sale by the archdiocese, citing spiralling costs and falling attendance.
"Closing this cathedral will remove Catholicism's visibility in the inner city and prevent any community growth in future - Catholic Utrecht isn't ready to be confined to a museum", noted a petition against the move. "Fine new things can still be achieved here, since we still have plenty to offer: celebrations, courses, faith meetings and processions, as well as a cathedral choir and pastoral work. Let us build further from this".
The petition was circulated after a parish council announcement that the mostly Sixteenth Century gothic St Catherine's cathedral, whose main altar houses relics of the Dutch patron, St Willibrord (658-739), could no longer be maintained. It said local Catholics still saw "growth, vitality and a future" in the cathedral, and criticised Church leaders for "focusing on contraction and a lack of perspective". However, the De Volkskrant daily said it was likely the building would be handed over for a "symbolic payment" to the neighbouring Catholic museum after a final decision by the Vatican.
Around 16 per cent of the 16 million inhabitants of the Netherlands belong to the Catholic church, according to National Statistics Office figures, although participation has declined sharply in the country, which was Europe's first to legalise brothels, cannabis, euthanasia and same-sex marriage. The country's parishes have contracted by more than half in the last 15 years, with only around four percent of registered Catholics attending Mass and church funerals currently far outstripping baptisms.
In a 2015 petition to the Pope, Catholics accused the Dutch primate and Bishops Conference president, Cardinal Willem Ejk of Utrecht of "destroying communities" when he proposed "melting down" 326 local parishes into 48 larger territorial units, each with a single church as "eucharistic centre". However, in a pastoral letter, the Cardinal warned that two-thirds of the churches in his archdiocese, which includes the suffragan sees of Breda, Groningen-Leeuwarden, Haarlem-Amsterdam, Roermond, Rotterdam and S-Hertogenbosch, would have been forced to close by 2025.
The Utrecht archdiocese spokesman, Roland Enthoven, told The Tablet Catholics could still be a "creative minority" through public witness and active involvement in national life. "Although we still have plenty of Catholics on paper, church attendance is now so low that there'll be only a few elderly people at Mass on Sundays if the trends continue", Enthoven told The Tablet. "There's a cost to being a church community - in money, time and voluntary work. It may simply be that secularisation is occurring faster in some places that others, and that dioceses like ours are merely ahead of others in taking these painful decisions".