EWTN News reports the destruction by fire of the 150-year-old Vondelkerk building in Amsterdam, formerly a Catholic church until its 1979 deconsecration by the modernist “Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam.” The article laments the architectural loss while ignoring the theological catastrophe of a consecrated space being reduced to an entertainment venue.
Sacrilegious Desecration Masquerading as “Urban Renewal”
The report admits the building was “deconsecrated, a formal act by the Church to remove the sacred character” before becoming an event space hosting weddings and concerts. This constitutes sacrilegium (sacrilege) under Canon 1172 of the 1917 Code, which forbade the secular use of consecrated spaces without formal reductio ad profanum proceedings. Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors condemned the notion that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55), yet here we see the conciliar sect facilitating precisely this separation by relinquishing Christ’s property to worldly pleasures.
The article’s focus on Stadsherstel Amsterdam’s crowdfunding efforts to rebuild the structure as an event venue exemplifies the apostasia ab occulto (hidden apostasy) denounced in Pius X’s Lamentabili Sane (Proposition 64). Nowhere does the report mention that such fires historically served as judicia Dei (divine judgments) against sacrilege, as seen in the 1931 fire at Madrid’s Apostolic Nunciature after its secularization (Acta Apostolicae Sedis XXIII, 1931).
The Silent Scandal of Deconsecration
Pierre Cuypers’ neo-Gothic architecture once directed souls toward transcendence through vertical lines and sacramental symbolism. Its conversion into a party venue embodies the horizontalist cultus hominis (cult of man) condemned in Pius XI’s Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of authority were destroyed” (§18). The conciliar sect’s complicity in this desecration reveals its fundamental incompatibility with the immutable doctrine that “the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” (Quas Primas §13).
Notably absent from EWTN’s report is any mention of Canon 1162 §2 requiring excommunication for those who violate sacred places. The article’s sterile description of “renovation” conceals the theological crime: reducing a domus Dei (house of God) to a domus voluptatis (house of pleasure) constitutes formal cooperation with Masonic secularization efforts condemned in Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus.
Silence on Divine Justice Screams Apostasy
The modernist narrative frames the fire as random misfortune rather than potential divine chastisement. Contrast this with the Church’s traditional response to the 1823 fire at Rome’s San Paolo fuori le Mura, when Leo XII ordered penitential processions recognizing God’s hand in temporal affairs (Bull Ad Plurimas, 1825). Antipope Leo XIV’s empty “telegram” about the Swiss ski resort fire—mentioned irrelevantly here—further illustrates the conciliar sect’s naturalistic worldview that ignores ultima realitas (ultimate reality).
Vondelkerk’s fate embodies the conciliar revolution’s fruits: desacralized spaces, invalid sacraments, and clergy who’ve abandoned munus sanctificandi (the sanctifying office). As St. Robert Bellarmine warned: “Those who permit sacred things to be treated with contempt will themselves be consumed by the fire they failed to extinguish” (De Clericis III.5).
Source:
Historic Dutch former Catholic church destroyed by fire on New Year’s Day (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 02.01.2026