“The word ‘God’ is often too easy to use in church services. Do we know who we mean by that? We could agree that by ‘God’ we mean the One who in the Jewish Bible and in the writings about Jesus is the advocate of refugees, exiles, of people whose rights are violated; who wants solidarity and justice rather than adoration and beautiful songs.”
These words were spoken by priest-poet Huub Oosterhuis, who died on Easter Sunday at the age of 89, in 2002 at the funeral of Prince Claus with whom he was friends. The two sentences marked Oosterhuis’ life. The Bible was his source of inspiration, he studied the book intensively. The language was his instrument, he wrote many hundreds of songs, which are sung left and right in the church. And politics was the field of activity of his faith, from the establishment of the Chile movement (1973) to membership of the Socialist Party (1999), of which he was a list pusher in the 2006 parliamentary elections. In 2020 he decided to publish an old collection of poems (Groningen) to be republished, this time also in Groningen, to support earthquake victims with the proceeds.
Oosterhuis became known to the general public as the father of singer Trijntje Oosterhuis and musician Tjeerd. When Trijntje was born, father Oosterhuis wrote Do you know me? a religiously tinted song that his daughter would later often perform. Trijntje and Tjeerd were children from a marriage that followed his break with celibacy as a priest.
For the city of Amsterdam, Oosterhuis was especially significant as a co-initiator of the establishment of cultural centers such as De Rode Hoed and De Nieuwe Liefde. This earned him the title of Pope of spiritual and religious Amsterdam.
Open-minded
Huub Oosterhuis was born on November 1, 1933 in Amsterdam South and grew up in an open-minded Roman Catholic family. After his secondary education at the Ignatius College, where the Amsterdam father Jan van Kilsdonk was affiliated as a religion teacher, he joined the Jesuits at the age of 18. He studied philosophy in Nijmegen and literature in Groningen. There he wrote his first church hymn in 1959 As long as there are people on earthmore than sixty years later still a reli top hit.
He was ordained a priest in 1964. The following year he became a student chaplain in Amsterdam. In 1960 Father Van Kilsdonk founded the student ecclesia, which Oosterhuis helped to shape.
During the church renewal of the 1960s, the vernacular replaced Latin in masses and Oosterhuis contributed to the production of responsible translations of the old texts and wrote new songs.
I have thoughts about life after death, which are so fantastic that I will not reveal them
Those were the years when compulsory celibacy seemed to be at an end for the Roman Catholic clergy. “My generation of priests strongly intended not to make celibacy the misfortune of your life and to change that church drastically within ten years,” said Oosterhuis. The parole. But that turned out to be an illusion. The church changed less quickly than hoped. His desire to have an ordinary family was incompatible with the office. In 1969 Oosterhuis was expelled from the Jesuit order. The following year he married violinist Josefien Melief from Enschede. The couple had children who made music their profession and formed the band Total Touch together for a while. In 1978 Oosterhuis and Melief separated. “Celibacy as a whole is not an ideal preparation for marriage,” he said.
Outside the ecclesiastical framework
After he was no longer allowed to preside as a priest in 1970, Oosterhuis continued his work for the student ecclesia outside the church framework. He developed numerous new initiatives. In 1972 he founded the political-cultural center De Populier, forerunner of De Balie (1986). In 1989 he became director of the Rode Hoed, a center for culture, religion and politics, a position he would hold until 1998. In early 2011 he started again, this time with the cultural-religious center De Nieuwe Liefde, which was opened on February 11 by Queen Beatrix.
Oosterhuis’ projects were characterized by the combination of poetry, religion and politics. He felt himself a student of liberation theology, of someone like the Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal. Religion was of no significance to Oosterhuis if it did not improve the lot of the less fortunate.
Youth festival
That conviction also connected him to Prince Claus. For many, the role that Oosterhuis played at his funeral came as a surprise. However, he later said that the first contacts with the prince date back to 1968, when he met him at a youth festival in Velp. Oosterhuis was a guest at Drakensteyn as part of an artist project and also regularly visited the Oranges in The Hague.
Oosterhuis called Queen Beatrix in the EO program Blue Blood “our kindred spirit when it comes to civilization, solidarity and mutual respect and tolerance”. He had to withdraw his suggestion in that program that her Christmas speech in 2010 was heavily censored by Prime Minister Mark Rutte: it was “my personal interpretation and experience”.
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Oosterhuis recognized the importance of language for the transmission of biblical ideas. Some bundles sold more than 100,000 copies. Yet outside church circles he received little appreciation for his poetry and songs. Gerrit Komrij qualified him as ‘the firm of Christ and Co’ and did not include any of Oosterhuis’s poems in his collections.
A plaster on the wound was the fact that the Free University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2002 for his liturgical-theological work. Actually, a Catholic university should have awarded him that honor, but they could not afford to do so after the ecclesiastical troubles. The fact that the distance to the Roman Catholic Church had become too great for this had already come to light in 2000 when a new songbook was published for the diocese of Roermond. All Oosterhuis songs had been deleted.
He remained undiminished popular with the Protestants. In those years, the NCRV top ten of spiritual songs contained no fewer than three songs by him. And on the Golden Song Day in honor of Huub Oosterhuis in May 2008, eleven hundred people came to the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam to sing his songs together.
Oosterhuis said about eternity in 2008 during an interview with newspaper Trouw: „I have thoughts about life after death, they are so fantastic that I do not reveal them. What could be better than thinking that you will see your loved ones again? You don’t have to explain to me that it’s nonsense, but it is the most beautiful nonsense I know. And is it actually nonsense?”