On many occasions one discovers how much one does not know. Even though I have studied Dutch church history for decades, I knew nothing about the role of the North Holland village of Lutjebroek in the history of Dutch Catholicism.

Lutjebroek is a name that sounds familiar to many Dutch people. The name has become a metaphor for a super boring place, where an average Dutchman has no reason to go. Quite a few of my compatriots even think it is an imaginary place that does not really exist. But Lutjebroek does exist. It is a village in the northern part of North Holland (the region above Amsterdam) with about 2200 inhabitants, which is now part of the municipality of Stede Broeck, between the historic cities of Hoorn and Enkhuizen. I lived in my youth about 25 kilometers away from Lutjebroek.

In the village of Lutjebroek stands a large neo-gothic church, which was built in 1876-1877, after a design by the famous architect Pierre Cuypers, who has many Roman Catholic buildings to his name. [He was also the architect of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.] The Nicolaas Church is still used for Catholic worship services, and a look at the parish website indicates that there is still plenty of life in this Catholic community.

How did my attention suddenly get drawn to the parish of St. Nicolaas in Lutjebroek? It was because a few days ago I attended a lecture during the annual meeting of the Society for Dutch Church History on the Dutch Zouaves. The Zouaves were members of an international military corps that supported the Pope in his last desperate (but vain) attempts in the years 1860-1870 to save from the Italians what was left of the Church State. The corps of the Zouaves consisted of about 12,000 idealists, who manifested an enormous loyalty to the “holy father,” and who were prepared to seal their loyalty to Pope Pius IX with their lives. The Netherlands contributed no fewer than three thousand Zouaves to the papal army. A significant number of them came from a few Catholic villages in North Holland. No less than 22 came from the small village of Lutjebroek. One of them, Pieter Jong, actually died on the Italian battle field and became the hero of Lutjebroek. The street where the large church is located is named after him. Furthermore, the memory of the Zouaves in Lutjebroek is kept alive by the local soccer club, which still bears the name de Zouaven.

The lecture about the Zouaves was held in a meeting room of the small Zouave Museum in Oudenbosch in Brabant (the predominantly Catholic southern part of the Netherlands). The “skyline” of this small historic town is dominated by the dome of the basilica, which is a copy of St. Peter’s in Rome. The Dutch Zouaves gathered in this little town, after which they coninued to Italy via Brussels. I hardly knew anything about this footnote in church history, but that gap in my knowledge has now been somewhat filled.

Incidentally, it is significant that the predominantly Protestant North of the Netherlands (including North Holland) has a number of traditionally Catholic enclaves. The tourist trap of Volendam is one of these. I lived as a child in North Holland in a village called Schermerhorn, where the majority was Protestant, but the adjacent village of Ursem was 99% Catholic. A similar situation occurs in some other regions of the country. The reason goes back to the Reformation and the period thereafter. In the Netherlands, the measures of the Protestants against Catholics were usually less aggressive than in other European countries, with the result that, here and there, significant Catholic enclaves remained unscathed. When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Catholics again regained full freedom to organize and manifest themselves, a host of church building projects followed almost immediately. The construction of the St. Nicolaas Church in the 1870s in Lutjebroek fits seamlessly into that development.