page_title: Religion in the Netherlands
section_title: Roman Catholicism
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in the Netherlands / Christianity / Roman Catholicism
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Vrijthof in Maastricht. De Sint Janskerk aan het Vrijthof. Rechts van de Sint-Jan, de Sint-Servaasbasiliek en de hoofdwacht. Deutsch: Vrijthof in Maastricht. Sint Janskerk (links) und Servaasbasiliek (rechts) am Vrijthof
context_page_description: Religion in the Netherlands was predominantly Christianity between the 10th and until the late 20th century; in the late 19th century roughly 60% of the population was still Calvinist and 35% was Catholic. Since then there has been a significant decline of Christianity—both Catholic but especially Protestant—so that nowadays Catholics outnumber Protestants and there is a secular majority, while also including a relatively common Muslim minority.
  In 2015, Statistics Netherlands, the Dutch government institute that gathers statistical information about the Netherlands, found that 50.1% of the adult population declared to be not religious. Christians comprised 43.8% of the total population and were divided between Catholics with 23.7% and the members of the Protestant Church of the Netherlands with 15.5%, members of other Christian denominations were the 4.6%. Islam comprised 4.9% of the total population, Hinduism 0.6%, Buddhism 0.4% and Judaism 0.1%.
  A large majority of the Dutch population believes that religion should not have a determining role to play in politics and education.
context_section_description: Currently, Roman Catholicism is the single largest religion of the Netherlands, forming some 23.7% of the Dutch people in 2015, down from 40% in the 1960s. According to the church itself, formal membership was 22.4% of the Dutch population in 2016.
  After 1970 the emphasis on Catholic concepts such as hell, the Devil, sin, divorce and remarriage, confession, the teaching of the catechism and  receiving the eucharist rapidly disappeared, and these concepts are nowadays seldom or not at all found within contemporary Dutch Catholicism. In the 1980s and 1990s the church became polarized between conservatives, whose main organization was the Contact Roman Catholics, and liberals, whose main organization was the Eighth of May Movement, (Dutch: "Acht Mei-beweging") which was founded in 1985. The latter organization had a difficult relationship with the bishops and was disbanded in 2003. As of 2014 cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, is the highest Catholic authority.
  In December 2011 a report was published by Wim Deetman, a former Dutch minister, detailing widespread child abuse within the Catholic Church in the Netherlands. 1,800 instances of abuse "by clergy or volunteers within Dutch Catholic dioceses" were reported to have occurred since 1945. According to the report, "The risk of experiencing unwanted sexual advances was twice as great for minors in institutions as the national average of 9.7%.  This finding reveals no significant difference between Roman Catholic institutions and other institutions." In March 2012, however, it was revealed that cases of 10 children being chemically castrated after reporting being sexually abused to the police had been left out. It also emerged that in 1956 former prime minister Victor Marijnen, then chairman of a children's home in Gelderland, had covered up the sexual abuse of children. According to the De Telegraaf newspaper, he "intervened to have prison sentences dropped against several priests convicted of abusing children." The factuality of these claims is unclear, though. The Commission rejected all the claims.
  The number of Catholics is not only declining, but many people who identify themselves as Roman Catholics also do not regularly attend Sunday Mass. 172,000 people, or 1.0% of the Dutch population, attend Mass on a given Sunday, according to information by the Catholic Institute for Ecclesiastical Statistics (KASKI) in their 2010 statistical update of the Dutch Catholic Church. Most Catholics live in the southern provinces of North Brabant and Limburg, where they comprise a majority of the population in the diocese of Roermond in the province of Limburg, based on self reported information by the Catholic Church.
  According to the church administration in 2010 the population of two dioceses' s-Hertogenbosch and Roermond had still a majority Roman Catholic. It is notable that SILA (Stichting Interkerkelijke Ledenadministratie) published precisely for these two dioceses a significantly lower number of Catholics in 2005. Based on the SILA-numbers, in the diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch in 2010 the population has no longer a Catholic majority, according to the church administration Catholics became a minority in the diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch since 2014.
  The number of parishes in the Netherlands has dropped between 2003 and 2015 from 1525 to 726.
  Since the provinces North Brabant and Limburg are in the Netherlands historically mostly Roman Catholic, some of their people still use the name a basis for their cultural identity rather than as a religious identity. A planned visit of Pope Francis to the Netherlands was blocked by cardinal Wim Eijk in 2014, allegedly because of the feared lack of interest in the Pope among the Dutch public. The vast majority of the Catholic population in the Netherlands is now largely irreligious in practice. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, shows that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics can be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. In 2015 only 13% of se
caption: Basilica of Saint Servatius (built 570) in Maastricht is the oldest church in the Netherlands
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