's-Hertogenbosch, Diocese of Bois-le-Duc

'S-HERTOGENBOSCH, DIOCESE OF BOIS-LE-DUC. - City and diocese of Holland. The city is the capital of North Brabant, a little south of the lower Meuse; the diocese embraces the eastern part of the province of North Brabant and the southern part of the province of Gelderland.

It has an area of 6,000 sq km with a population of 1,215,000 inhabitants, of whom 989,400 are Catholics, distributed in 358 parishes, served by 791 diocesan priests and 1,370 religious; it has a major seminary at St Michielsgestel and a minor one at Haaren; it has 126 male religious communities and 327 female ones (Ann. Pont. 1952, p. 376).

The diocese was erected by Paul IV on 12 May 1559, as a suffragan of Malines, with Francis Sonnius as its first bishop. Until 1637 seven bishops governed it under difficult circumstances: Protestantism, the war against Spain. Catholicism was flourishing there again when in 1629 the city was conquered by the Republic of the 7 Provinces, which suppressed the Catholic religion. From 1657 until 1853 the diocese was administered by apostolic vicars. In the Concordat of 1827 between Pope Leo XII and King William I it was stipulated that new dioceses would be restored in the Netherlands: and among these Bois-le-Duc; the execution having been delayed because of the revolutionary uprisings of 1830, Pius IX on 4 March 1853 restored the diocese as a suffragan of Utrecht; Msgr. John Zwijsen, apostolic vicar of Bois-le-Duc, was elevated to archbishop of Utrecht, to which see he renounced in 1868 and was appointed bishop of Bois-le-Duc. In 1865 the first provincial Synod was held in the diocese. Admirable is the Gothic Cathedral dedicated to St. John the Evangelist, formerly a collegiate church, from as early as 1560; the first Romanesque building goes back to 1210, the Gothic one was begun in 1280, but devastated by a fire in 1419 it was rebuilt in its present form between 1419-1520 with touches added in 1530; it measures 109.50 x 28.55 m. The building suffered greatly in 1566 and in the Calvinist period from 1629 to 1810; the work of restoration, obtained through the contribution of the State, the province, the city and the faithful of the diocese, is owed to the initiative of Msgr. Zwijsen, reorganizer of the diocese. In the interior the miraculous statue of the Blessed Virgin is much venerated. The diocesan Museum is also precious.

In Nijmegen (v.) is found the Catholic University founded in 1923, in Tilburg the Catholic higher School of commerce.

Cesario van Hulst