Our Lord in the Attic: The Secret Catholic Sanctuary

Why is it significant?

Notice this handsome seventeenth-century brick canal house at Oudezijds Voorburgwal thirty-eight with its stepped gable and stone quayside. To passersby and Protestant city magistrates, this looked like the private townhouse of wealthy Catholic merchant Jan Hartman.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Notice this handsome seventeenth-century brick canal house at Oudezijds Voorburgwal thirty-eight with its stepped gable and stone quayside. To passersby and Protestant city magistrates, this looked like the private townhouse of wealthy Catholic merchant Jan Hartman. But climbing the narrow spiraling timber staircase reveals one of the most astonishing religious secrets in Europe: Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder, or Our Lord in the Attic.

Why did Catholics have to hide in an attic? After the Dutch Revolt of fifteen seventy-eight, public Catholic worship was strictly outlawed by Calvinist authorities. However, practical Amsterdam magistrates adopted a pragmatic policy of gedogen, or pragmatic toleration: Catholics were allowed to practice their faith, provided they did so behind closed doors where no one on the canal could see or hear them.

In sixteen sixty-one, Hartman knocked out the ceiling joists across the top three floors of his canal house and two adjoining properties, creating a hidden two-hundred-seat baroque church suspended in the rafters. Complete with a pink-painted marble-effect altar, gallery balconies, and a working pipe organ, it was an entire cathedral in the roof!

Step up into the narrow wooden galleries: looking out through small attic windows over the rooftops of Amsterdam, you can feel the remarkable blend of stubborn faith and mercantile pragmatism that defined early modern Dutch society.