‘De gemakkelijkste weg naar de hemel’

Het Brabants katholiek offensief in de Verenigde Staten. De missie onder de Native Americans (1835-1865)

Samenvatting

A North Brabantine Catholic offensive in the United States. The mission among the Native Americans (1835-1865)

North Brabantine clergymen, together with their Flemish colleagues, played a crucial role in building and spreading Catholicism in the United States. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the young republic was the Netherlands’ most important mission area, with the vicariates, after 1853 dioceses, of ’s-Hertogenbosch and Breda as the largest suppliers of staff and funds by far. Neither in the historiography on North Brabant, nor in that of Dutch Catholicism, much attention has been paid to this offensive. The strategy of Brabantine and Flemish Catholic leaders was aimed at the globalization of Catholicism, at the formation of a single world church with a single doctrine of Ultramontanism, struc- tured hierarchically, and under the infallible authority of the Pope. The young church in the United States urgently requested support from the Southern Netherlands, where the first bishop had received his training. The common approach on both sides of the Atlantic was based on five pillars: a shared ideology; a comparable domination of society and religion by Protestants; a wide range of motivated and well-trained priests in Brabant; an intensive cooperation in the geographical triangle Louvain-’s-Hertogenbosch-Breda; and modern forms of social mobilization. The second part of this article focuses on the brothers Christiaan and Adriaan Hoecken from Tilburg. They are exemplary because of their romantic sublimation of loneliness, sacrifice, martyrdom, and death, characteristic for the missionaries of the Missouri Mission between 1835 and 1865.