Asher Kaufman, at 18, set out on June 28, 2025, for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He spent the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He went on to visit Belgium, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, South Africa, Cameroon, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia and Italy. This most recent post highlights his arrival in the Netherlands. Asher has a love of history which animates this post.
Upon stepping aboard the train bound for Amsterdam at the beginning of June after the end of my time in Germany, I had some decisions to make regarding where I would stay and what I would be trying to do during my time in the city. I had originally intended to go because the head of the Marriage and Family Institute in the Archdiocese of Utrecht had agreed to an appointment with me to discuss potential formation of Children’s Rosary groups in that See. However, for the other days, I was quite open. What was I going to do for that week? Well, for the first day, the day I arrived, I had discovered online that there would be a Eucharistic procession through the city in honor of the Feast of Corpus Christi. Attending would be the Bishop of Haarlem-Amsterdam as well as numerous priests of the diocese. I resolved to be there if I could.
As I sat on the train, flipping through pages of hotel options on TripAdvisor and Booking.com, I was blessed to find a place just steps from the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkerk, a beautiful nineteenth century neogothic Church dedicated to our Lady right in the downtown. The procession was scheduled to begin and end at this Church.
The train pulled into Amsterdam Centraal, and I hurried out onto the front door to catch a cab to the hotel. The hotel was a very quaint Amsterdam Canal house originally built in the eighteenth century. Its creaking wooden floors and banistered staircases were enclosed by beautifully wallpapered walls and elegant paintings. The front of the house was typical of a canal house with twelve windows stacked onto four floors, three on each floor. The façade of each house touches that of its neighbors even though the color scheme and detail of each one is distinct. The roof includes a curved ornament on each corner not unlike the concave top corners of many baroque churches in Rome, such as Santa Maria in Traspontina. The staircases inside were winding and steep as well as quite small; I was often worried about missing my footing and falling all the way down, especially when carrying up my bags. It hardly needs to be said there were no elevators.
Having left my bags in my room and taken what materials I needed for my expedition, I set out to chase down the Procession which had already left the Church by the time I arrived. With the help of a nice public works employee and his printed out map, I managed to track down where they had gone.
At last I turned a corner and saw before me a large mass of people with a large white and gold-rimmed baldacchino at the front under which a prelate walked slowly, holding aloft the Sacred Host. The prayers of the Rosary wafted over the gentle early summer air interspersed with Church hymns sung by a band walking near the front and projected over loudspeakers. At the back two police cars escorted the group to prevent an errant driver or bicyclist from accidentally coming in from behind, always a risk in Amsterdam’s narrow but busy little canal roads. The decades of the Rosary were prayed in a different language, alternating between Dutch, Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Latin. When we reached a bridge over one of the canals, the bishop stopped, turned toward the downtown of the city and solemnly blessed it with the Host while we all kneeling around in a semicircle. It was a blessed experience. A little boy in the front stood with his father and threw flower petals from a basket in front of the monstrance as it passed.
As we passed streetcorners, delivery and cab car drivers, bicyclists (which are a legion in Amsterdam), and pedestrians were all stopped in their tracks by our stately and slow-moving procession. Some people were simply annoyed at the interruption from the expressions on their faces and some simply stared with a neutral expression on their faces, clearly resolved to simply wait out the delay. Others still seemed a bit mesmerized by what they saw; certainly there was something a bit beckoning, almost quixotic, about what was transpiring in the middle of this loud, crowded, pulsating city, as though these busy modern men with their earbuds in their ears, their satellite-driven GPSs in front of them, and their pressing engagements carefully filed away in digital calendars were suddenly confronted by something entirely unexpected and nearly inexplicable. Here was a line of people singing and walking slowly through the streets, following a sort of standard or icon. Were they protesting? Surely not, for they did not seem in the least angry. Were they celebrating? Perhaps, but not in the usual way, for there was no shouting, no drinking, no laxation of the typical norms of behavior. No, indeed; everyone seemed quite serious, reverent, but yet joyful. It was an event that a modern man could perhaps understand but could hardly comprehend, a relic from a past age, yet here it was not hidden away in some church but calmly making its way through the public streets in ways that the Catholics of Amsterdam would only have dreamt of during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some people we passed were clearly quite moved; they removed their caps or even knelt down.
Soon we turned a corner and were back at the Church from where we had started. We filed in, reposed the Eucharist, and went into an adjoining hall for some refreshments.
The local bishop, Mgr. Hendriks, was at this time of fellowship, and I was able to meet him and make contact. He seemed to quite like the Children’s Rosary.
That evening, I went to Mass at the Kirjtberg parish, another beautiful neogothic Church in the heart of the city. This church was built in the nineteenth century, after the emancipation of Catholics in the Netherlands. It was designed by Friedrich Mengelberg, a German-Dutch architect who also incidentally completed much work on the Cologne Cathedral as well. The interior of the church is quite stunning, marked by very colorful stained glass windows behind the apse.
The next day, I set out for the nearby city of Haarlem. The original idea was to attempt to find the offices of the bishop to discover the official means of requesting an appointment with him, but I became enmeshed in frustrating difficulties.
To begin, the address I visited that was listed online as the official bishop’s offices were not in fact his but rather those of the diocesan administration. No, I was told; the archbishop’s offices were to be found near the Cathedral of St. Bavo. After discovering this, I walked the mile or so back to the center of town to where my GPS indicated St. Bavo was located. I came in through the central town square where a large farmer’s market was struggling to continue its services in the rainy and chilly morning weather. I observed the large Gothic Church, with its stone upper level and façade and brick lower level. It looked just as a proper parish church in a large city should, and I began setting about looking for the bishop’s offices. I poked my head into the visitor’s entrance to the church and was greeted by a sign informing me that entrance to the building would cost five euros. How strange, I thought, for a Catholic church to charge an entrance fee. I thought perhaps I might ask whether the bishop’s office was nearby. Indeed I was quite surprised when I found out that the church was not the one I was seeking at all but that there were two by the same name in Haarlem. I had gone to the older, Protestant St. Bavo’s. It was from the Middle Ages and had been turned into a Calvinist Church during the Reformation.
The next morning was the day appointed for my meeting at the diocesan offices of Utrecht. I met Ms. Elisabeth Bangma-Mertens, the head of the Marriage and Family Institute for the Archdiocese of Utrecht. We had a very positive meeting and discussed ways the Children’s Rosary could become present in the diocese to help child and really family engagement. She was already familiar with the Consecration book due to Cardinal Eijk’s involvement with it and support of it. Overall, I think there is hope to get the Children’s Rosary off the ground there once the summer holidays end.
I also clambered up the Dom tower of Utrecht, the tallest church tower in the Netherlands. The nave of the Church connected to it partially collapsed in the seventeenth century, so now a courtyard separates it from the church. It is quite high, but the view is breathtaking. One can even see Amsterdam on a clear day. It made me contemplate how men must have worked on the very highest points of that building knowing fully well the likelihood of their falling off and dying.
Just before I left Utrecht, I was thinking to myself that I needed to get myself some lunch. I happened as I sauntered down a street to catch sight of a South African flag waving in the early afternoon breeze. Intrigued but not entirely surprised given Holland and South Africa’s colonial connection, I decided to take a look. It was a store run by two South African expats from the Johannesburg area. They had moved up to Europe some years before and had some South African classics for sale, including biltong. I ended up purchasing some Shepherd’s pies which, I only realized when they put in the bag, were frozen.
Well, I thought, this just got a bit more challenging.
With my frozen pies in hand, I caught the train back to my hotel in Amsterdam. The manager was kind enough to let me use the small oven they had downstairs to heat them up, but even with that, when I began to cut into the first one, I discovered the center was still a block of ice. Not wanting to inconvenience the poor man further, I decided to bite the bullet and continue. So I sat there in the chilly afternoon eating my frozen pies.
The following day was one I had been looking forward to. I had purchased tickets to the Rijksmusum, the home of a beautiful collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings. I had seen a few of these during my visit to the Louvre, and it had been one of my favorite parts of that museum. Therefore, I was quite excited to lay eyes on what was housed inside of the Rijksmuseum.
To begin, the itinerary starts with some Northern Renaissance art which depicts figures such as Mary Magdalene and St. Francis. These are very early modern works which are beginning to include rich detail and perspective but still primarily focus on Biblical themes. Important names from this time period would be Carracci and van Scorel.
One of my favorite images comes from the baroque period and is a specialty of Dutch art from that era; it is Jan Brueghel’s Still Life with Flowers in a Glass. It shows a very ostentatious display of flowers all packed into a vase. These were expensive commodities at the time, but they are drawn with such attention to detail as to mesmerize the viewer for a protracted period of time. The leaves, petals and buds, even the small insects are crafted with a precise attention to detail.
Also common in Dutch paintings from the Golden Age is reference to contemporary or recent historical events. For instance, Allegory on the Abdication of Emperor Charles V in Brussels shows the Habsburg Charles V, emperor of one of the most powerful empires in European history dividing his inheritance between Ferdinand his brother to whom he gave the Holy Roman Empire and Phillip, his son, to whom he gave Spain and its holdings (including the Netherlands).
Another such historical painting is Mary Stuart and William II, depicting the royal couple when they were as yet newly married and very very young. Of course, William and Mary would become king and queen of England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, though in fact William was Dutch and born a stadholder.
One rather unfortunate episode from Dutch history can be seen in Iconoclasm in a Church by Dirck van Delen. It depicts the destruction of statues and altar pieces in churches after the reformation in the Netherlands, something which quite changed the interior of Dutch churches even to this day.
Of course the Rijksmuseum would not be complete without a copious collection dedicated to Rembrandt, including masterpieces like The Jewish Bride, The Standard Bearer, and The Wardens of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild. These are, in my opinion, some of the best paintings in the museum.
Romantic elements, coming into vogue at the beginning of the nineteenth century, also make an appearance, such as in the picture shown below of the monk meditating outside the ruins of the monastery at night. The dark, haunting structure and the deep affect of the monk make for kind of mysterious, almost ominous ambiance favored by the Romantic artists.
Needless to say, I am skipping over a great deal of the museum’s collection, but if one wants to look into it further, I believe there are official catalogues of all the paintings available online.
After leaving the Rijksmuseum, I quickly covered the distance to the Van Gogh museum in order to be in time for my reservation there. My mom had encouraged me to go to this one, and, though it would not have been my natural inclination, I was quite happy in the end that I paid it a visit.
The museum was designed to give the visitor more or less a journey through van Gogh’s life. Chronologically, it is a rather short journey since he began to earnestly practice his passion of painting and drawing at age 27 and only continued for about ten years until his death. This period is from 1880 to 1890. His early interest in art specifically is tied to his desire to depict the peasants, the simple folk of the countryside and their ways of living, something I very much understand and admire. His early inspirations were Jules Breton and Jean-Francois Millet. He made some truly beautiful images of the simple joys of country life such as Avenue of Poplars in Autumn.
His first real masterpiece was The Potato Eaters. This painting is quite dark (literally but also a bit figuratively) and shows a family around a table eating a simple repast of potatoes. The faces are hard bitten, and the clothing is simple. Van Gogh was very pleased with what he had been able to convey, something of the reality and also the tragedy of the peasant life.
When in 1886 van Gogh moved to Paris, there were numerous images he made of Montmartre, then the artists’ quarter since it was cheap and still relatively undeveloped.
However, I think some of his best work comes from Arles, the small country town in the south of France where he moved after Paris. There, works like Field with Irises and others are quite striking in their beauty and detail.
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Van Gogh had a rather intense personality and likely suffered from some mental illness. He was, however, a deep and affectionate person as is evidenced by the extensive correspondence between himself and his brother, Theo. Theo was an art dealer in Paris who supported him financially and advocated for his work. Vincent painted Almond Blossom in 1890 not long before his death on the occasion of his nephew’s birth. I love that painting particularly for its detail and bright, joyful colors.
Van Gogh died of suicide, and his brother passed away not long after. Theo’s wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger is largely responsible for promoting Vincent’s work and making it so well known, even traveling to New York and living there for three years to promote it there.
On the morrow after my visit to the art museums of Amsterdam, I decided to visit a slightly different sight, the Church of Our Lord in the Attic, a clandestine Catholic Church from the seventeenth century now turned into a museum.
Some may know that following the Spanish loss of control over the Netherlands, the United Provinces (as they were called at the time) became Calvinist in their official religion. The practice of Catholicism was tolerated—as long as it was kept out of the public eye. Thus, clandestine churches popped up all over Amsterdam, including this one, which was in the upper floor of a merchant’s canal house. When one enters it, it is quite stunning, containing a full altar, pews, and even an organ.
I also paid visits to the Oude Kerk, a Church completed in the fourteenth century and converted into a Protestant facility in the sixteenth, as well as to the Church of St. Nicholas, built in the nineteenth century when Catholicism was again permitted in public in the Netherlands. Together, these three locations (the Oude Kerk, the Lord in the Attic, and St. Nicholas) are very near to each other and symbolize three different stages of Dutch Catholicism: the pre-Reformation period, the suppression during and after the Reformation period, and then the renewal of public worship in the nineteenth century.
And with that, so ended my time in Amsterdam. It had been a lovely, relaxed, but productive couple of weeks after I had left Assisi.
The next day, I caught my flight for Rome where I met my parents who were flying in from Connecticut the next day. What befell us in Rome and whom we met I will not describe myself. For that, you may refer to the many posts my mom published during our time there.
With this, I now conclude my travel blog. After our time in Rome, we returned to the United States, and in a few weeks’ time, I will begin seminary. I thank those who have followed my trip and prayed for its success, and I hope these posts have provided some edification to all of you.
