On Saturday, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Wilhelmus de Bekker of Paramaribo. The Dutch-born prelate turned 75 on 27 April and has been the bishop of Suriname’s sole diocese for almost ten years. Father Antonius te Dorshorst has been appointed as Apostolic Administrator until a new bishop has been appointed. Like the retired bishop, Fr. Toon, of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, is also Dutch. But after 46 years in Suriname, he says, “I feel more Surinamese than Dutch.” He admits surprise at having been chosen as Administrator, considering his age (71). “I thought, I am 100 per cent safe.”
^Fr. te Dorshort and Bishop de Bekker.
Bishop de Bekker, born in Helmond in 1939, is a teacher by training. In the 1970′s he travelled to Suriname, where he studied theology and was ordained in 1985. He worked as a parish priest in Paramaribo and was appointed as the diocese’s vicar general in 1995. Upon the retirement of Bishop Aloysius van Zichem in 2003, Msgr. de Bekker became Apostolic Administrator, and a year later, in 2004, he was appointed as the new bishop. Bishop Ad van Luyn, then of Rotterdam, was the main consecrator. Archbishops Edward Gilbert of Port-of-Spain and Lawrence Burke of Kingston in Jamaica were co-consecrators.
It will be interesting to see if the successor of Bishop de Bekker will be a native son of Suriname, or, once again, a Dutch priest. Paramaribo has been a diocese since 1958 and was the Apostolic Vicariate of Dutch Guyana-Suriname between 1842 and 1958. Nine of the ten bishops and vicars apostolic who headed the Church in modern Suriname over that period were Dutch. The sole exception is Bishop de Bekker’s predecessor, Bishop van Zichem, who is now 81.
Bishop de Bekker will remain in Suriname, ready to assist the Apostolic Administrator and, presumable, the new bishop as well. He will take up residence in Groningen, which lies about 30 kilometers west of Paramaribo.
There are now two Dutch bishops active abroad: Bishop Joseph Oudeman, auxiliary of Brisbane in Australia; and Archbishop Bert van Megen, Apostolic Nuncio to Sudan.
Photo credit: Jason Leysner
This entire process has now resulted in the 15th archbishop of Freiburg im Breisgau: Msgr. Stephan Burger. At 52 he is by far the youngest metropolitan archbishop of the country – the next youngest is Berlin’s Cardinal Woelki, at 57. Until now, Archbishop-elect Burger was the judicial vicar of the archdiocese, representing the archbishop in legal matters and leading the ecclesiastical court. Notable in this context is that the judicial vicar is also responsible for marital matters, most especially deciding on the validity of a marriage.
The Trappist monks of Sion Abbey in Diepenveen, north of Deventer in the Archdiocese of Utrecht, are abandoning their abbey. Built in 1883 for a community of more than 100 monks, has become too big, housing only 12 Cistercian monks of the Strict Observance, Trappists for short. Maintenance costs for the buildings have become too high for the small community and, as Abbot Alberic Bruschke says, sharing it with other users is not possible, since it wouldn’t be a monastery any longer.
The exact location and shape of the new foundation on the island is not yet known, but the choice of Schiermonnikoog is not random. In the local old dialect, the name of the island means ‘Island of the grey monks’, referring to the Cistercian monks who had come from the Claercamp monastery in Frisia. In the Middle Ages they established a grange on the island and were responsible for much of the early reclamation of land from the ever-shifting sand flats and sea to the south, between island and mainland. In 1580 that ended, as the Reformation took all possessions from the monastery, including Schiermonnikoog. But the monastic history of the island has always been recognised, and in 1961 a statue of a monk (pictured at right) was placed in the island’s only village.
^Schiermonnikoog from the air, seen from the south west. Apart from the village, the entire island is a national park. It is some 18 kilometers in length and forever moves slowly eastward.
