Trajecta - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2019

In 1815 the United Kingdom of the Netherlands started, uniting the territories of the former Dutch Republic with the so-called Southern Netherlands. The unification and its political ramifications had huge impact on the Jewish communities in the southern provinces, mainly concentrated in the cities Brussels, Gent, Antwerp, Namur and Liège. During the 15 years within the United Kingdom, up until 1830, these communities witnessed a sharp increase in local Jewish communities and members, mostly because of internal migration of Amsterdam Jews. Moreover, Jewish life in the southern provinces was centralized and brought together with the northern Jewish communities into an overarching central denominational structure. Finally, the new structures were used to install a new sense of Dutch national identity upon the Jewish citizens, especially stressing the values of patriotism, monarchism and the ability to speak the national Dutch tongue. The 1830 Belgian Revolt resulted in a significant set-back for Jewish life in the new Kingdom of Belgium, although it continued on the path set-out in the preceding ‘Dutch era’.

This article connects the history of attitudes toward death and funerary practices in 19^th- and 20^th-century Europe to the ongoing discussion on secularization. It emphasizes how recent scholarship on the history of death – following broader trends within religious studies – has abandoned the standard modernization-narrative of secularization, and moved to view the issue through the prism of conflict and market competition. Depending on the historical context and the Church-State relationship, a conflict and/or market competition perspective can deepen our understanding of the secularization of death and burial practices. In periods of intense socio-political struggle over the role of religion in the modern polity, a conflict perspective helps to grasp the processes of secularization. Once secular forces have succeeded in breaking the grip of the churches on death and burial, a market perspective can be more useful. Both serve as alternatives to the traditional understanding of secularization as an anonymous process of modernization. An in-depth analysis of the development of a secularist funerary culture in Belgium aptly demonstrates the shift in the master variable influencing secularization – from socio-political conflict to market competition.

Between 1908 and 1966 the Dutch Jesuits founded five retreat institutions in the Netherlands to support the laity with spiritual care and to enable them to undergo (a part of) the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius van Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits). Notwithstanding the enormous popularity of these retreat activities, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, this phenomenon has hardly been subject to academic research. With this article, being a part of my postdoc-research project at Tilburg University, I hope to give a start to this study. At the turn of the century, the group retreat work the Dutch Jesuits introduced for the male laity in the Netherlands originated in Belgium and France. During the years to follow this work became exceptional popular among Catholics living in the southern provinces of the Netherlands. Due to a high organisational level of Catholic social and political institutions and the involvement of the Catholic upper-class and local parish priests the propaganda of the Jesuits for their retreat work in the Southern provinces was extremely effective. The (industrial) employers as well as the Jesuits regarded the retreat work as a splendid opportunity to ‘civilize’ the Catholic working-class and to keep them away from communism and socialism. As a consequence of new theological and spiritual insights, after World War II things started to change in the traditional retreat work. In the fifties and sixties the retreats were transformed into meetings of spiritual reflection and counselling, at last becoming socio-cultural training courses from the seventies onwards. The lack of a straightforward underlying theological vision for these transitions on which all Jesuits could agree on, the rising costs, and the declining number of Jesuits members, resulted in 1974 in the ending of their participation in this group-organized work. However, retreats given on an individual basis continued and from the nineties new initiatives were launched to popularize the Spiritual Exercises using digital techniques and the internet.

This article addresses the political engagement of Catholic students in the Netherlands during the inter-war period. Recently there has been an increased academic interest both nationally and internationally, in juvenile and radical Catholicism in the inter-war years. In the Netherlands, the magazine De Gemeenschap and the girls’ movement De Graal are important examples of the radical Catholicism of the youth. Though the religious activism of these Catholic youth groups has been studied extensively, we still do not know much about their involvement in politics and more specifically, their interaction with the Catholic party. This article looks at how the activation of the laity affected the political engagement of Dutch Catholic students. Based on ideas about Catholic Action and the importance of a lay apostolate for the rechristianization of society, Catholic students established new groups for religious and political activism. As these groups were neither installed nor controlled by the hierarchy, they formulated alternative political interpretations of Catholicism. Thus, the youth challenged the religious legitimacy of the Catholic party, whose politicians listened to them only reluctantly.

In May 1945, shortly after the Liberation of the Netherlands, Dutch Reformed minister Willem Banning (1888-1971) published a sketch of a ‘personalistic socialism’. Shortly thereafter, he became one of the founding fathers of the renewed Dutch Labor Party. At the first convention of the new party he proposed that the process of renewal of socialism had to be informed by ‘spiritual values’. In Dutch historiography, the role of Banning as one of the founders of the Dutch Labor Party was never really been understood as religiously or even ideologically motivated. The so-called ‘Breakthrough-movement’ – which sought a new synthesis between political action and religious or ideological inspiration – has been generally interpreted in terms of opportunism: in order to persuade Catholic and Protestant workers to vote for the Labor Party, some spiritually and morally loaded vocabulary was added and the harsh anti-religious affiliation of classic socialist politics was (temporarily) toned down. In this article, I propose a new analysis of the breakthrough-movement, inspired by new studies on public debate in the Netherlands and in Europe between 1918 and 1960 and by an in-depth analysis of the intellectual development of Banning. This leads to the conclusion that the spiritual and religious sources of inspiration of the breakthrough movement should be seen as a turning point in the Dutch debate on the essence of humankind and his/her role in society, church and politics in a period still problematically labelled by the metaphor of ‘pillarization’.