Kloosters in Brabant op weg naar de eenentwintigste eeuw

Samenvatting

Convents in Brabant Towards the Twenty-First Century

The visible remnants of the conventual life in North Brabant have disappeared gradually in the years after the Second World War. From the existing 66o convent buildings, some 200 have been demolished or otherwise destroyed. The same happened on an even greater scale after the Beeldenstorm (iconoclasm) of 1566: At that point, almost all convents were dissolute and demolished, or partially destroyed; others were rebuilt for new, often military functions. Nowadays in our historic cities only scant remnants are left of these once extensive buildings.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during the Katholieke Herleving, the catholic revival, we saw the foundation of hundreds of new religious congregations on a grand scale. The members of these congregations, brothers and sisters, mostly worked in charitable institutions for the poor and old, or in hospitals and schools. Most cities and villages in North Brabant saw a widespread building boom of several hundreds of brand new conventual buildings. Sometimes they were small village convents looking like a parsonage or a gentleman's house, sometimes however they developed into labyrinth-like complexes of schools, chapels, dormitories and outbuildings. However, a small number of medieval and eighteenth century convents, mostly in the northeast of Brabant, retained their original religious function.

In the years after 1960, the number of religious sisters, fathers and monks diminished dramatically, from more than 44,000 in 1967 to 5,901 in 2012. Some of the vacant convents have in recent years been redeveloped as offices, housing health institutes, homes for the elderly, museums, and buildings for cultural or social functions. After 2000, the province of North Brabant initiated research about the future use of these historic buildings. As a result, in 2010, the provincial institute Erfgoedfabriek was founded, with the objective to redevelop and revive historic buildings. Among these buildings are also some convents, for example in Dongen and Roosendaal (Mariadal). Since historic convent buildings tell stories about our past, they represent a social value that exceeds their real estate value. That justifies the provincial efforts to revive and redevelop these important buildings in the spatial context of village, landscape or city.