INTRODUCTION

‘Zurück!’ (Stand back!) shouted Pastor Quaedvlieg, a priest from the Prussian border town of Haaren, when he and the members of his procession were brought to a halt by three Dutch national policemen in the autumn of 1878. Only shortly before, he and his pilgrims, returning from the important Marian shrine of Our Lady in 't Zand near Roermond in the southern Dutch province of Limburg, had formed a liturgical procession. Quaedvlieg had donned his chasuble in a field, brought out the processional cross and unfurled the liturgical processional banners. Then he had directed the forming of ranks: first two columns of women, then himself in the middle, then two columns of men, and finally the train, consisting of three covered wagons with baggage. In doing this he was deliberately taking a risk; since the beginning of the Kulturkampf in Prussia, the rules relating to public religious rituals had also been sharpened in Dutch Limburg, and throughout the Netherlands the holding of religious rituals in public had become an extremely sensitive issue. Of the eleven provinces of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, only the two most southern, North Brabant and Limburg, had Catholic majorities. Of the 230,000 inhabitants of Limburg, about 99 per cent were Catholic. From 1830 to 1839 Limburg had belonged to the newly formed Belgium, and until the 1860s it was part of both the Netherlands and the German Bund.