Photo: Daniel Ibañez/CNA A Dutch Catholic newspaper warned churches will continue to close in the Netherlands, where half of all Catholic parishes have already been dissolved amid plummeting church participation.
“It’s never good to panic, but there are grave concerns about the way things are going here,” said Peter Doorakkers, an editor at the Katholiek Nieuwsblad weekly.
“It’s been hoped people would draw the obvious conclusion – that if you want your church to stay open, you don’t just need to support it financially, you also have to attend it more. But if you look at the numbers at Mass now and average ages, it’s obvious more churches will close in the near future.”
The newspaper said the Catholic population of the Netherlands had fallen by a fifth in 15 years, with just 5% of the country’s 3.7 million registered Catholics still attending Mass, while 55% of parishes had closed.
Research
However, it said research suggested Dutch society had not yet reached “peak secularisation” and warned that, with up to 80% of Church funds devoted to maintaining buildings, the “biggest wave of church closures” was still to come.
Katholiek Nieuwsblad said in an editorial it had hoped to show the disappearance of Catholic parishes had “far-reaching consequences” for local communities, but conceded that many former parish functions had instead been “effortlessly and silently taken over” by other social organisations. While some closures had been painful, most village communities had “recovered surprisingly quickly”.
However, its findings had “touched an open nerve”, prompting extensive responses from readers, the newspaper said.