Trajecta - Volume 30, Issue 2, 2021

This article examines the relationship between heritage and three dimensions of religious change that have characterized Europe since the 1960s, namely secularization, pluralization, and spiritualization. Following an analysis of the role of religious heritage in both public discourse and academia, the essay turns to recent heritage initiatives, and explores how churches, secular organizations and government agencies have responded to the shifting religious landscape in their heritage work. The article shows that while secularization, understood here as declining participation in traditional religious congregations, has forced churches and synagogues to change hands and find new uses, it has also made possible new types of secular-religious cooperation in heritage that move in a postsecular direction. The diversification of European society, which features the growth of new religious communities, has prompted some to mobilize tropes of “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian-Humanist” heritage to exclude religious minorities. At the same time, growing diversity has also led to calls to pluralize Europe’s religious heritage. Grassroots and top-down efforts to recover the presence of minorities in Europe in past decades have flourished. Finally, the article explores spiritualization as a religious activity that highlights creativity in the ongoing meaning making that constitutes heritage work today.

Recently, significant contributions to the study of religion and gender have been made, as evidenced by Belgian and Dutch literature, amongst others. Joan W. Scott has pointed out that, in these studies, gender is expressed and analyzed as a multi-layered concept – it can represent power, social institutions, or organization. It can express ideas of subjective identity and what is normative. This article explores religious female congregations of the Catholic Church in the first half of the nineteenth century and focuses on power relationships. It unpacks the use of gender in religious history and demonstrates that a gendered history of Catholic institutions is possible even when men define the institutional framework and exclude the women who are, in fact, already a part of it.

In the spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Daughters of Mary and Joseph, a sister congregation founded in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 1820, adapted themselves in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century to the changed and changing society. The abandonment of rigid authority structures and the move to permanent education brought a sense of liberation to many of them. It activated them to work for the betterment of the poor and the oppressed, at home and in the mission. Inevitably, the rapid social changes in many sisters also led to alienation and distancing from their spiritual heritage and thus also from the raison d’être of the Congregation. Thanks to fundamental studies that appeared in the eighties and nineties in the field of the spirituality of religious life, they reaffirmed their heritage and thus their individuality as a religious community. Within this spiritual climate, mutual understanding grew between the sisters in the Netherlands and their fellow sisters in Indonesia.

In the years after the Second World War, the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands played a significant role in providing spiritual and social care to political prisoners and their families, both within and outside residential and internment camps. Although this is mentioned in historical studies, systematic research is still lacking. This article bridges this gap and introduces this theme as a research subject. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Dutch government tasked Catholic chaplains and their Protestant colleagues to do pastoral and social work in detention and internment camps. This chaplaincy, centralised by the Dutch Catholic Church, was mainly dominated by their regular clergy. Ecumenical cooperation was sought when alleged government abuses in the camps were being investigated, or during campaigns to educate the Dutch population in the message of clemency and forgiveness for small political offenses. There were also Catholic initiatives to help ex-political prisoners re-integrate into society. These initiatives often varied by diocese. Attempts to set up a centralized organisation for this work, in the form of the Dutch Vatican Mission, and later through Catholic charities, failed due to mismanagement. Although at first reluctant to cooperate with the semi-public ‘Association for the Supervision of Political Delinquents’, the Church soon became a partner and helped re-integrate Catholic political delinquents. Several Catholic institutions were involved, and high ranking political (KVP) and religious networks played an important role in shaping a ‘mutual’ policy. Motives for the clergy to help (ex-)political delinquents were numerous. Some had notions of mercy, forgiveness and Christian charity, and some saw this as a project of moral re-education and ‘opportunistic conversions. Finally, there were those clergy who feared the prisoners would divorce their partners, while other tried to prevent the growing communist influence on the former political prisoners.

The movement of Christenen voor het Socialisme (CvS, Christians for Socialism) existed in the Netherlands from 1974 to 1993. It was the radical variant of the renewal movement of the sixties that came about when churches and confessional political parties began to emphasize the need for radical social and political commitment within the Christian faith. CvS strived for a new contemporary identity by uniting Christianity and Marxism, two forces hitherto considered incompatible. CvS was part of an international movement that reflected the polarized political and social situation especially in South America, where the mix of Christianity and Marxism was known as “Liberation Theology” and in Europe perennially threatened by the Cold War. This article investigates the rise of CvS as a fundamentalist movement and explores its development towards a differentiated progressive mentality group. In the end, CvS did not survive. Its decline is described and interpreted against the backdrop of a changing political and religious environment.