Peter, you don’t need to speak Dutch to understand a bleat when you hear

one. As a frequent visitor to the Netherlands over the years, I can tell you

that the Catholic Church there, like all churches (but not mosques!), is

flat on its back. The Dutch bishops are notoriously rebellious, and have

been for 40 years. You see the fruits of their ministry everywhere in

Holland: empty churches, and a collapsing culture. Maybe nothing could have

saved the Church in Holland, but if you’re going to go down, at least go

down fighting heroically. The institutional RC Church there has given up

without a fight. Did you know that prior to the 1960s, Holland, which is

only half Catholic, produced as many or even more missionary clergy than any

country in the world? It’s all vanished now.

How did this happen? Here’s a hint from a 2002 cover story on Holland’s crisis I did for NR:

It has been remarked that no society on earth was more thoroughly transformed by the Sixties than Holland’s. James Kennedy, a history professor at Hope College in Michigan, wrote his doctoral dissertation on how the Netherlands went from being one of the most religious, socially conservative countries in Western Europe to being a bourgeois Babylon in a few short years. Postwar Dutch society lost faith in the old system, which the counterculture showed to have been made of straw. “A number of Dutch religious and secular leaders concluded there wasn’t a lot to be done to resist,” explains Kennedy. “One thing the Dutch political culture does well, maybe too well, is to accommodate itself to new moods in society. What you don’t do is try to create a ’silent majority’ to resist new trends, because in this view, trends can’t be bucked.” The Left captured the culture without firing a shot. [snip] … “This is a very small country,” says Andreas Kinneging, 40, a legal philosopher who is the intellectual godfather of Holland’s nascent conservative movement. The Dutch “have a few national papers, a few channels, a handful of universities, a few publishers. Most of the elites know each other. They’re all liberal, and all think the same. They consider themselves moral, upright, good people. Their power is tremendous . . . You have to be very independent-minded or very cosmopolitan not to be indoctrinated by this worldview.”