The Heilige Lodewijkkerk, also called the St. Louis Church, is a

Roman Catholic church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

at the Steenschuur in

Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wi ...

History

The first church on this place was built in 1477 and was a chapel, the St. James Chapel, belonging to a guesthouse for pilgrims on their way to

Santiago de Compostela Santiago de Compostela is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia, in northwestern Spain. The city has its origin in the shrine of Saint James the Great, now the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, as the destination of the Way of S ...

. This chapel was therefore dedicated to St. James the Great. The front facade of the church was built in 1538. The tower, which is still called the Saint James Tower, was built in 1594 and its carillon was built in 1598. The chapel and the guesthouse were sold in 1547 to the parish of the Pieterskerk and in 1567 to the municipality of

. The municipality of

used the chapel first to store cereal and afterwards to test textiles.

The explosion of 1807

The history of the present Heilige Lodewijkkerk is tightly linked to the nearby explosion of a ship with gun powder in 1807. The explosion destroyed a large part of the city center including a catholic church at the Nieuwe Rijn. The St. James Chapel that was used to test textile was heavily damaged, but the tower was still intact. King

Louis Bonaparte Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (born Luigi Buonaparte; 2 September 1778 – 25 July 1846) was a younger brother of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. He was a monarch in his own right from 1806 to 1810, ruling over the Kingdom of Holland (a French cl ...

, also known as Lodewijk Napoleon ordered that the chapel would be rebuilt into a church for the Catholics who used to go to the church at the Nieuwe Rijn. The church was designed by Jan Giudici. Afterwards the church was dedicated to Saint Louis, known as Heilige Lodewijk in

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

, who was the patron saint of

Current use

Since 1957 the church is used by the Parochie Heilige Lodewijk. Every day

Mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different eleme ...

is celebrated. The church is known for its traditional liturgy in

, English and

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

Pictures from inside

Church Leiden Lodewijk 2.JPG Church Leiden Lodewijkkerk 4.JPG Church Leiden Lodewijkkerk 3.JPG

References

External links

Official webpage of the church
{{Catholic Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands 1477 establishments Lodewijkkerk Tourist attractions in South Holland Rijksmonuments in Leiden Roman Catholic churches completed in 1477 Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands 15th-century Roman Catholic church buildings in the Netherlands