Clandestine church

A clandestine church (Dutch: schuilkerk), defined by historian Benjamin J. Kaplan as a "semi-clandestine church", is a house of worship used by religious minorities whose communal worship is tolerated by those of the majority faith on condition that it is discreet and not conducted in public spaces. Schuilkerken are commonly built inside houses or other buildings, and do not show a public façade to the street. They were an important advance in religious tolerance in the wake of the Reformation, an era when worship services conducted by minority faiths were often banned and sometimes penalized by exile or execution.

According to historian Benjamin Kaplan, clandestine churches became common in Europe in the wake of the Reformation as a way for governments to permit a degree of religious toleration for minority Christian denominations and Jews. Both political and religious considerations frequently led governments to ban all worship not sanctioned by the state, and in many countries, members of minority religions worshiped together in total secrecy, risking punishment by the state. However, such a regime was frequently difficult to enforce, and as a result, while many jurisdictions permitted only one form of worship, authorities knowingly permitted members of minority faiths to worship privately. In others, the law permitted public worship by minority faiths, but only if it was more or less invisible to the general public.

The 1648 Treaty of Osnabruck, part of the Peace of Westphalia, specified three types of worship: "domestic devotion", public religious services ("exercitium religionis publicum"), and private religious services ("exercitium religionis privatum"). It is into this last category that clandestine churches fall. These churches were characterized by group religious services carried out by clergy "in their own houses or in other houses designated for the purpose," and not "in churches at set hours." Kaplan writes that the pretense of clandestinity "enabled Europeans to accommodate dissent without confronting it directly, to tolerate knowingly what they could not bring themselves to accept fully."

In a surviving Dutch document from 1691, the Regents of the City of Amsterdam specified the terms under which a Roman Catholic church, called the Glabais, could be built by the Franciscans "to avoid giving any offense." The entrance must not be on the Jodenbreestraat, but "behind" on a lesser thoroughfare, the Burgwal. There would be no parking of sleds on the Jodenbreestraat. There was to be no "waiting for another person" on the street after services. The priest was responsible for seeing that no beggars came to ask the worshipers for alms. Services were timed so that there would be no chance of Roman Catholics offending Protestants by meeting them in the streets on their way to Dutch Reformed churches. And, finally, the Catholics must not walk to church in groups, nor carry prayer books, rosaries, or "other offensive objects" in a manner that made them visible to Protestant eyes. Benjamin J. Kaplan regards these requirements as typical of those in effect across Europe wherever clandestine churches were permitted.

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