Amsterdam: the Host in the Fire and the Silent Walk

Amsterdam in 1345 was a young town of traders on the Amstel. Its parish church was St Nicholas, today called the Oude Kerk, the Old Church.

According to tradition, a man lay gravely ill in a house on the Kalverstraat and feared he would die. He sent for a priest, who brought him Holy Communion as viaticum, the food for the last journey. After the priest had gone, the man was sick and vomited. The rule of the time was that such remains be burned out of reverence, so they were thrown on the fire in his hearth. Sources do not agree on whether it was his wife, his caretaker or a maid who did it.

The next morning, the woman raking the fire found the Host unharmed in the ashes. A later version says it hung in the air among the flames, and that she took it out with her bare hands.

She put it in a small chest and took it to the priest at St Nicholas. The next day, the story goes, it was back at the house. This happened again, three times in all. Then the priest and clergy carried it to the church in solemn procession. People took the returns as a sign that the house itself should be a holy place. That is how the procession came to be remembered, and how later generations understood the route from the Old Church to the Kalverstraat.

A Dutch reference says that the returning Host is not in the oldest text and was added over time.

Many devotional books call him Ysbrand Dommer, and one recent article even gives his age as 65. The scholar Peter Jan Margry, who wrote the standard work and the entry in the Dutch national pilgrimage database, says the man's identity is unknown. He rejects the name, which goes back to a suggestion by the nineteenth-century writer J. A. Alberdingk Thijm.

The house was made into a chapel called the Heilige Stede, the Holy Place. A road from the village of Sloten was laid out for pilgrims and is still called the Heiligeweg, the Holy Way. Fire was a danger in a timber city. The chapel burned in the city fire of 13 April 1421, was rebuilt, and burned in part on 25 May 1452, in the worst fire in Amsterdam's history. Popular accounts say the Host was again found unharmed. A third chapel was in use by 1456 and was enlarged in 1457 and again about 1498.

The feast was kept on the Wednesday after 12 March, the old day of St Gregory, and at Corpus Christi. A market ran for two weeks around the March feast. Pilgrims bought small badges to pin on as proof of their journey. For the Holy Year of 1500, people of Holland and Zeeland could gain the Roman jubilee indulgence at the chapel. Historians think the pilgrims helped make the young town rich and well known; it became a city known as a place of miracle as well as of trade.

Maximilian of Austria came in 1484. According to the stories he had been ill and had vowed the pilgrimage if he recovered. In 1489 he allowed Amsterdam to bear a crown over its arms, and the imperial crown is still seen there today, on the tower of the Westerkerk. One modern writer points out that the city's loans for his wars may have counted as much as his gratitude. Later his grandson, the Emperor Charles V, is named among the pilgrims. The print at the top of this page, made in 1518, shows how the devotion was spread.

In the sixteenth century this shared devotion became a dividing one, as Charles Caspers shows. In the image-breaking of 1566, accounts differ. One says the chapel was badly damaged. Another says it was spared because women defended it. The standard history discusses the crucial part the community of sisters played in protecting the Holy Place.

In May 1578 came the change Dutch history calls the Alteration: the Catholic city government was replaced by a Protestant one. The chapel was stormed on 29 May. The last Host kept there was probably lost at about that time. Ash from the fire of 1345 was still there in 1578, according to the diary of Brother Wouter Jacobsz, who lived through those years. The public procession was banned and public Catholic worship ended.

The chapel passed to the Reformed Church and became the Nieuwezijds Kapel, the Chapel of the New Side. In 1624 the chapel master was ordered to remove the hearth. From 1579 the chest linked to the miracle was held at the Burgerweeshuis, the city orphanage, and the historian Jan Wagenaar traced it there in 1762.

Catholics in the Dutch Republic worshipped in hidden churches, within limits the authorities tolerated. Among the beguines of the Begijnhof the devotion found a home. Their courtyard kept its Catholic life, and from about the second quarter of the seventeenth century the chapel of Sts John and Ursula there became the centre of the devotion.

Pastor Leonardus Marius, there from 1631, was its great promoter, with his Amstelredams eer ende opcomen (1639) and a book of devotions, Getyden (1640). In 1645 the poet Joost van den Vondel, a Catholic convert and the greatest name in Dutch letters, wrote for the third centenary. In 1665 a larger hidden church was made from the sacristy and a nearby house. One devotional account says a monstrance moved there was stolen soon after.

Others kept the old road alive in another way. Catholics walked the former procession route privately and in silence, on their own, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On 16 December 1651 a woman of 91, Agatha Loen, stated before a priest the route she remembered from before the Alteration: Kalverstraat, Dam, Nieuwendijk, Ramskooi, Nieuwebrug, Warmoesstraat, Nes, Langebrug, and back. That statement is why the old way could be found again. Jubilees were kept in 1745 as well.

Catholics regained the right to worship openly in 1795, but the constitution of 1848 kept a ban on outdoor processions. The ban stood in law until the constitutional revision of 1983.

In 1840 the Begijnhof pastor N. J. A. Steins Bisschop began to revive the cult, and he obtained a plenary indulgence for the fifth centenary of 1845. A. J. Pluym published the first scholarly study that year, in a war of pamphlets between Catholic and Protestant writers. In 1871, 14,000 Hosts were given out on the feast. Rector B. H. Klönne led a further revival from the 1880s and founded the Miracle Guild, about 700 strong, in 1892.

The old chapel stood until the twentieth century, used for Reformed worship. Its Reformed owners decided to sell the land, and demolition began in 1908, despite protests from Catholics and from people of culture. A new Protestant chapel of 1912 and shops took its place. To Catholics the loss was painful, and it is remembered so. A sculpted stone now marks the place, and in 1988 a column of the old chapel was raised on the Rokin; it was put up again in April 2018 after metro works.

In 1880 a Catholic of Amsterdam, Joseph Lousbergh, came by an old text describing the medieval route. With his friend Carel Elsenburg he decided, in the Moses and Aaron Church in 1881, to walk it every year in silent pilgrimage. Because a procession was against the law, they carried nothing and said nothing aloud. There were no banners, no vestments and no hymns. A walk like that broke no rule.

It began very small: twelve walkers in 1885. Adriaan Apol joined in 1884 and Henri de Veer in 1889. Rector Klönne gave open support in 1887. The first group from outside came from Haarlem in 1886, and the name "stille omgang" came into use in 1892. Lousbergh died in 1914. A formal board followed in February 1915. Elsenburg's son, grandson and great-grandson all later chaired the society. Margry describes it as a re-enactment reduced to the barest form, in keeping with the shy and careful Catholicism of the Netherlands, yet also a quiet stage for Catholics seeking their place in Dutch life.

Its growth surprised everyone. Local societies, as many as about 300 across the century, organised pilgrimages from towns and villages all over the country. For decades the night walk was for men, and women had a separate walk early in the morning. Women were admitted to the night walk only in 1965.

No walk was held from 1941 to 1945, under the German occupation. Amsterdam hosted the 27th International Eucharistic Congress in 1924. For the sixth centenary, kept in 1946, about 56,000 people gathered in the Olympic Stadium.

From the 1960s the numbers fell sharply, in step with the changes in Dutch Catholic life. In the 1980s a new chairman stressed the spiritual and ecumenical side of the Walk, and a policy paper was issued in 1985. The jubilee of 1995 had a strong ecumenical character. The Meertens entry now speaks of a tradition in transition. In 2024 one group walked all the way from Utrecht.

In 2005 another step came. For the 150th year of Our Lady's Church on the Keizersgracht, a public Sacrament procession went over the canals to the Begijnhof, the first of its kind in the city since 1578. Over a thousand joined the next year's procession, led by Bishop Jozef Punt of Haarlem. The silence of the Walk has remained as well.

Pilgrims first go to Mass in one of the city's churches, and the Blessed Sacrament is exposed in several places through the night. The Archdiocese of Utrecht, for example, begins with Mass in the Basilica of St Nicholas near Central Station, followed by silent adoration. Then they walk, group after group through the night, for about an hour.

The route starts at the Spui and goes along the Kalverstraat and the Nieuwendijk to the Prins Hendrikkade, back by the Warmoesstraat and the Nes, then by the Langebrugsteeg, and past the place of the old chapel. It passes the nightlife of the old centre. No one prays aloud or sings, and no one wears vestments or carries a religious sign. Five points on the route mark a new intention for prayer. The city customarily asks bars along the way to close their curtains and keep the music down.

There is something moving in this picture: people walking in silence past Saturday night in the middle of a great city, because a Host was once found in the ashes of a house. Each year has its intention. In 2026 it was that God may reach many through the Eucharist and that we may not reject him.