Cardinal Eijk to Celebrate Pontifical Mass in the Netherlands

On March 15, Laetare Sunday, His Eminence Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, will celebrate for the first time in his episcopal ministry a Pontifical High Mass according to the traditional Roman Rite. The Mass will take place in the historic church of the Immaculate Conception (Grote Kerk) in Oss, Netherlands. For many faithful attached to the ancient Roman liturgy, this occasion represents a historic moment in the contemporary Catholic life of the Netherlands, the first celebration of a pontifical Mass by a cardinal since the post-Conciliar liturgical reform. The Mass will begin at 12:30pm; the church is located at Kerkstraat 15, Oss.

A Very Beautiful 16th Century Book of Hours

I recently discovered this very beautiful Book of Hours by the Flemish artist Simon Bening (1483 ca. - 1561), who specialized in the production of richly illuminated manuscripts, and made several such prayer books for wealthy patrons such the Emperor Charles V and the Infante of Portugal. This particular example is known as the Flower Book of Hours, since nearly every page without a large illustration has four different flowers on it, as in the fourth image here. (On many pages, one or more of the flowers is replaced by a bird, insect, or some other animal; an especially good example of this is given below.) It was made around 1520-25, for an unknown patron; by this time, Bening had moved from his native place (either Ghent or Antwerp) to Bruges, where he was an important figure in the bookmakers’ guild. He is regarded as the last major exponent of the tradition that produced this kind of work in the Netherlands, which were taken over in the 16th century by the worst and most destructive form of Calvinism; the Beeldenstorm, a famous and particular vicious outbreak of iconoclasm, took place about 5 years after his death.

The book begins with a calendar, and as is very often the case in Books of Hours, each page is accompanied by the sign of the zodiac that begins within that month, and some form of agricultural activity: for the current month, July, the sign of Leo, with the reaping of crops in the background, and a waterfowl hunt in the foreground. In many places in the manuscript, where a line has no text, it is filled with a decorative bar, also very typical of higher quality Books of Hours.

The illustration which introduces a prayer to the face of Our Lord, with Christ as the Pantocrator, two unlabeled prophets in the left margin, and the carrying of the Cross at the bottom.

Each new section of the book begins with the first part of the text arranged like this, with a large single block capital and a border with a colored background full of flowers, birds, and insects. There are just a few pages with some of the more whimsical kind of marginalia often employed in the books, such as the monkey leading a bear on a leash seen below in the margin of the picture of the Visitation.

Most of the pages look like this.

Books of Hours usually include one Gospel reading of a major feast from each of the four Evangelists, who appear in the accompanying images. Here we see St John, and the Gospel of the Mass of Christmas day, John 1, 1-14.

The Gospel of the Annunciation, St Luke 1, 26-38.

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The Church of Our Lady in Roermond, the Netherlands

My thanks to a friend, Fr Mark Woodruff, for sharing with us these pictures which he took during a recent visit to the church of Our Lady in Roermond, in the south-eastern Dutch province of Limburg. It was founded as part of a Cistercian women’s monastery in the early 13th century, and is therefore commonly known as simply “the Munsterkerk - the monastery church.” (None of the monastic buildings remain.) It owes its current external appearance to a major restoration done by a local architect named Pierre Cuypers from 1863-90. Cuypers also did a major neo-Gothic renovation of the interior, but much of his work was removed in a subsequent restoration of 1959-64, which aimed to return the building to something more like the sparer original late Romanesque style (or what the restorers imagined to be such.)

At the crossing, underneath the dome, is the tomb of the church’s founders, Gerard III, Count of Flanders (1185 ca. - 1229, and his wife, Margaret of Brabant. (1190 ca. - 1231). 

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A Pilgrimage Revived in the Netherlands

Our thanks to Mr Ivan Zelic for sharing with us this account of a newly-revived pilgrimage tradition in the Netherlands, and the accompanying photos. This procession is held in honor of St Cunera, one of the companions of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins; a short account of her legend is given below.  

According to an old tradition, Saint Willibrord, the first bishop of Utrecht, received a request from the people to elevate the virgin and martyr Cunera van Rhenen, one of the companions of St Ursula, that is, to exhume her body from its first burial place and put it in a shrine. This would make her one of the very first Saints to be venerated in the Netherlands. In recent decades, however, she slowly fell into oblivion, except in Rhenen itself, where her name can still be seen everywhere. How fitting it is, then, that the common people have revived veneration for her by resuming the centuries-old tradition of pilgrimages in her honor. This year it was held for the second time on her feast day, June 12th, after being revived last year.

The large church dedicated to her in Rhenen opened its doors at 1 p.m. to let in the crowd who were already waiting, including many new participants who read last year’s report in the newspaper and now wanted to be there themselves. The priests of the Fraternity of St Peter’s apostolate in Amsterdam once again led the procession and celebrated the Holy Mass.

The procession left the church at half past two, a beautiful sight. At the front are the thurifer and crucifer, flanked by torch bearers, followed by four young men carrying the bier with the unique, centuries-old statue of Cunera on it, kindly lent for the occasion by the church in Vorstenbosch. Behind it walked Father Knudsen with the first-class relic of Saint Cunera in a silver reliquary, flanked by two standard bearers, and followed by about sixty people, including many young children.

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Obrecht’s Mass of St Donatianus

The Martyrology notes today as the feast of a Saint called Donatianus (‘Donatien’ or ‘Donat’ in French, ‘Donatiaan’ or ‘Donaas’ in Dutch), who served as the seventh or eighth bishop of Reims in France from roughly 360-90. Alban Butler’s original Lives of the Saints has no information to offer about him, other than a mention of the translation of his relics to Bruges in 863; in the revised modern edition, he is not included at all. He was adopted as the local patron Saint, and a large collegiate church was dedicated to him. When Bruges became the seat of a bishopric in 1562, this church was made the cathedral, but it was destroyed when the city was overrun by the French revolutionary army; in France itself, the church from which he was translated, the royal abbey of St Nicasius outside Reims, was also destroyed.

The Madonna with Ss Donatianus and George, and Canon Joris van der Paele, ca. 1435, by Jan van Eyck. (Joris is Dutch for George.) Donatianus’ instrument, in addition to his mitre and crozier, is a wheel with five candles on it; this comes from a legend that he was thrown into the Tiber while visiting Rome, but saved from drowning by the pope, who threw him a wooden carriage wheel which he was able to use as a flotation device. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons; click to see in high resolution. The painting has its own article on Wikipedia, which offers a lot of interesting detail about its history.)

The cathedral of St Donatianus in Bruges in 1641 (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The royal abbey of St Nicasius of Reims. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In the later 15th century, there lived in Bruges a very successful and wealthy fur merchant named Donaas de Moor, who was active in civic life, and, along with his wife Adriane de Vos, a magnificently generous benefactor to the poor; he was dean of the fur traders’ guild, and by turns alderman, mayor and treasurer of the city, as well as a guardian of a pilgrim hospice, and founder of an almshouse. The couple were equally generous to their parish, the church of St James the Apostle, to which they donated the altarpiece of the high altar and the choir stalls, and maintained a chantry chapel behind the high altar, dedicated to their name Saints.

Triptych of the Deposition from the Cross, ca. 1475, by the anonymous Netherlandish painter known as the Master of the St Lucy Legend. This was commissioned for the altar of the de Moors’ chantry; on the side panels, Donaas de Moor and Adriane de Vos are shown kneeling with their respective name Saints behind them. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The de Moor almshouses in Bruges. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Marc Ryckaert, CC BY-SA 4.0. 

However, in May of 1483, Donaas de Moor was exiled from Bruges for political reasons; he retired to a country estate, and died only four months later. In his will, he left provision for the creation of a Mass in honor of his Patron Saint, which was then commissioned from the Flemish composer Jacob Obrecht (1457-1505), and sung for the first time in the church of St James on the Saint’s feast day in 1487.

Here is a splendid recording of a concert performance of the Mass done by the Tallis Scholars in that very same church in 2018; the video also gives a decent tour of the building.

A Clandestine Catholic Church in Amsterdam

A friend recently visited one of the so-called clandestine Catholic churches in Amsterdam, and graciously shared his pictures of it with NLM. In the days when the Dutch Republic was a Protestant confessional state, Catholics were not allowed to have public churches or religious ceremonies; they were, however, allowed to maintain chapels in private homes, with certain restrictions (e.g. the entrance had to be on a side street.) This is one of the most famous, known as “Ons Lieve Her op Solder - Our Dear Lord in the Attic”; a map of the others, totaling more than 30, is given below. The chapel was installed in 1661 by a merchant named Jan Hartman shortly after he purchased the building, which was then about 30 years old.

The altar seen from the choir loft.

Clandestine churches could not have anything on the outside that showed that they were churches, since the Dutch Protestants fully understood the power of beauty to preach the Faith.  

In the 19th century, legal restrictions on Catholic worship were repealed, and new public churches began to be built. In 1887, a basilica dedicated to St Nicholas, the patron of the Netherlands, was completed on a site about 3 minutes’ walk away, and the following year, Our Lord in the Attic was converted into a museum, but Mass is still said here on occasion, and all the liturgical furnishings have been preserved. (The page about the chapel on Dutch Wikipedia relates that in the early 18th century, the congregation had very much outgrown it, and the pastor wanted to demolish it and move to a much larger facility, but the plan was stopped by the intervention of the reformed church and the civil authorities only a few days before the demolition was scheduled to begin. The same page has more information about the chapel’s history, and is accompanied by a very large Wikimedia Commons page; Chrome can translate Dutch very well.)

The baptismal font.

The confessional.

Here we see all the other liturgical objects needed for the proper functioning of a church: chalices, monstrances, cruets, reliquaries etc.

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Two Franco-Flemish Polyphonic Masses

Here are a couple of more wins for YouTube’s suggestions algorithm, two very nice Masses of the late Franco-Flemish school of Renaissance polyphony. The first is by Philippe Rogier, who was born ca. 1561 at Arras in the Spanish Netherlands (now in France); the kings of Spain recruited so many musicians and singers from that area that they maintained a full choir of them, known as the Flemish chapel (“capilla flamenca”), in addition to the native choir, the “capilla española.” Rogier became the assistant director of the Flemish chapel in 1584, and director of all the music at the court of Philip II of Spain two years later. He was ordained a priest at an uncertain date, but died in Madrid in 1596 at the age of only 35. He was a prolific composer, with well over two hundred compositions, the majority of them sacred works, listed in the 1649 catalog of the library of King John IV of Portugal where they were kept. This library was destroyed by the terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the corpus of Rogier’s surviving works counts fewer than 60 pieces, over half of which are motets. Here is one of his seven surviving Masses, the Mass Domine, Dominus noster for three choirs.

Rogier’s contemporary and fellow Netherlander, Géry de Ghersem, was born at Tournai ca. 1574, and as a boy, sang in the capilla flamenca under his direction. In 1604, he returned north, and found a position in Brussels as the director of music for the court of Albert VII, archduke of Austria and sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands; he was also ordained a priest, and worked in several different positions until his death in 1630. He apparently did most of his composing while he was in Spain, and almost all of his corpus, which was very large (perhaps even larger than that of his friend and teacher Rogier), was also destroyed in the library of John IV. In his will, Rogier had asked Ghersem to publish a group of six of his Masses and dedicate them to the King of Spain; Ghersem did this, while adding one of his own to the collection, the only work of his that survives complete, based on a motet by Francesco Guerrero, Ave Virgo Sanctissima.

Two Franco-Flemish Polyphonic Masses

Here are a couple of more wins for YouTube’s suggestions algorithm, two very nice Masses of the late Franco-Flemish school of Renaissance polyphony. The first is by Philippe Rogier, who was born ca. 1561 at Arras in the Spanish Netherlands (now in France); the kings of Spain recruited so many musicians and singers from that area that they maintained a full choir of them, known as the Flemish chapel (“capilla flamenca”), in addition to the native choir, the “capilla española.” Rogier became the assistant director of the Flemish chapel in 1584, and director of all the music at the court of Philip II of Spain two years later. He was ordained a priest at an uncertain date, but died in Madrid in 1596 at the age of only 35. He was a prolific composer, with well over two hundred compositions, the majority of them sacred works, listed in the 1649 catalog of the library of King John IV of Portugal where they were kept. This library was destroyed by the terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the corpus of Rogier’s surviving works counts fewer than 60 pieces, over half of which are motets. Here is one of his seven surviving Masses, the Mass Domine, Dominus noster for three choirs.

Rogier’s contemporary and fellow Netherlander, Géry de Ghersem, was born at Tournai ca. 1574, and as a boy, sang in the capilla flamenca under his direction. In 1604, he returned north, and found a position in Brussels as the director of music for the court of Albert VII, archduke of Austria and sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands; he was also ordained a priest, and worked in several different positions until his death in 1630. He apparently did most of his composing while he was in Spain, and almost all of his corpus, which was very large (perhaps even larger than that of his friend and teacher Rogier), was also destroyed in the library of John IV. In his will, Rogier had asked Ghersem to publish a group of six of his Masses and dedicate them to the King of Spain; Ghersem did this, while adding one of his own to the collection, the only work of his that survives complete, based on a motet by Francesco Guerrero, Ave Virgo Sanctissima.

Dominican Music in the Netherlands

I have been in correspondence with Mr. Theo Menting, a member of the Dominican Laity at the Dominican House in Huissen. The laity there have two excellent choirs, which recently sang at Santa Sabina, S. Maria in Trastevere, and other churches in Rome. Click here for a web posting about them (in Dutch).

The performances of one choir, the "Kloostercantorij," includes compositions by Pere André Gouzes, O.P., Father Henk Jongerius O.P., prior of the convent, and Fr. Huub Oosterhuis. To get an idea of the work of the second choir, "Phos Hilarion," which focuses on the classical tradition, click here for their rendition of Totus tuus.

Phos Hilarion intends shortly to make the performance of Dominican Chant a central part of their repertoire.

We congratulate our Dominican lay brothers and sisters for this "joyful light" now shining in Holland!