The Holy Place of Hasselt

Ask in Hasselt about the origin of the Holy Place and you will usually be told a story that begins with a drunken Frisian. At the time of the St Marcellus flood of 1219, so it goes, a Frisian champion struck the ciborium of a priest with his beer jug, so that the consecrated hosts fell to the ground. Shortly afterwards the desecrated ground was hit by a flood. In an apparition the Virgin Mary then commanded that a church of atonement be built, to be venerated as the tomb of the Lord.

The story is real enough, but it does not come from Hasselt. It is an exemplum of the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach, who wrote it down in the thirteenth century without mentioning Hasselt at all. Only in 1893 did the Kampen curate B.P. Velthuijsen hesitantly apply it to the Holy Place; a year later the Hasselt parish priest Joannes R. van Groeningen spread it across the country as the authentic origin story of his pilgrimage site.

In the medieval sources no proof has ever been found that this exemplum has anything to do with Hasselt. A medieval miracle book did exist; from it a single wonder tale survives, about the healing of a lame young man from Twente.

The oldest charter whose authenticity is certain dates from 19 May 1355. In it Bishop Jan van Arkel of Utrecht moves the dedication feast of the capelle Sacramenti in Hasselt to the Sunday after Corpus Christi and grants an indulgence of forty days. Thus arose the Hasselt Indulgence: a pilgrimage on a moveable date, tied to a summer town festival with a market and a fair, which would live on into the twentieth century.

Something must have happened shortly before 1356. On 25 January of that year four berader — churchwardens — of the heiligher Stede buy an estate at Wijhe for three hundred and eighty old shields; the chapel therefore already had considerable income. A charter of 23 June 1357 calls it finished, and the bishop names the many miracles and the great throng of people as his reason for founding a vicarage there.

How people prayed there we know from the indulgence formulas themselves. As early as 1374 the consecrated host was kept beneath the altar, as in a grave, and the pilgrims walked humbly around that free-standing altar as often as they could. In Zwolle an early fifteenth-century pilgrim badge was dug up in the 1980s, showing a monstrance with a priest beside it and the inscription hoc est corpus Christi hasselt.

On 28 October 1582 the Holy Place was plundered: images and votive gifts vanished, the altars were torn down. In July 1590 the dilapidated chapel was demolished entirely and the magistrate banned the pilgrimage — a ban that had to be repeated year after year. In 1612 the town put soldiers’ huts on the site, turned it into a dung heap and in 1616 raised a gallows there as a deterrent. On the town plan Joan Blaeu published in 1649 the Holy Place is accordingly an empty patch.

And still they came. At the indulgence of 1659 a punitive miracle is even said to have occurred: the town had tightened its watch, but a sudden fire near the town hall called the guards away, so that a good hundred pilgrims got onto the Holy Place. There they crawled about on their knees, for the object of the cult was gone — only the place remained. At the Enkpoort, opposite that ground, eight to ten thousand German seasonal labourers embarked every year for Holland. From father to son they genuflected on the now unrecognisable soil, for a safe crossing of the Zuiderzee.

In 1891 the parish bought back the most important part of the ground; on 19 June 1892 the Hasselt Indulgence was restored under its old name. About a thousand pilgrims came that year, some five thousand around 1910. The new church on the Holy Place was consecrated on 24 October 1933, with a Latin inscription over the gate to the procession park calling the spot a refuge of the afflicted and the hopeless. After 1955 the Hasselt Indulgence was no longer celebrated, and the last group pilgrimage is recorded on 15 July 1964. And still, at Corpus Christi, people gather on the ground where the chapel has not stood for a good four hundred years.