Every Friday afternoon, a courtyard along a busy Amsterdam street fills with Muslim men parking their bicycles and removing their shoes as they prepare for prayers. They may not see it this way, but the worshipers at the Fatih Camii Mosque are part of a fundamental change in the Netherlands.
The site where Allah is now loudly praised used to be a Roman Catholic church. It has been stripped of its crosses and paintings, and the spires on its two plump towers now carry a crescent moon.But it is not Islam, brought here mainly by Moroccan and Turkish immigrants, that is troubling the Dutch priests and pastors. Rather it is a more far-reaching shift, the continuing decline of Christianity.
Dwindling church attendance by Catholics and mainstream Protestants has forced the clergy in much of Europe to confront the same, often painful question their counterparts in New York and other American cities have asked: What to do with the cavernous churches, the myriad chapels and sprawling monasteries that have become redundant and require small fortunes to keep up.
Unused churches can be found in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe, and many are simply closed. German churches, though, are supported by tax revenues, and French churches long ago became municipal property.
But in the crowded Netherlands, where the churches own the buildings and space is precious, the response has been pragmatic and secular.
Cash-strapped church elders have sold off more than 250 places of worship in the past two decades, buildings where Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans had prayed for a century or longer. Many have already been converted into libraries, shops, cultural centers and even apartments and discotheques.
Some changeovers signal another kind of transition. A handful of churches have been bought by young evangelical churches, New Age groups and growing Muslim communities.
Jews have followed the trend, though on a smaller scale. One community sold a little-used 18th century synagogue in The Hague, and it was recently inaugurated as a mosque. Another synagogue, in Amsterdam, houses the Resistance Museum. A third is being turned into a store.
The Dutch government's national heritage foundation often pays part of the conversion costs, particularly if it involves one of the 2,300 places of worship listed as protected. Protected or not, the churches are seen as part of the neighborhood, as a vital part of the urban landscape, said Jaap het Hart, director of the foundation.
"They do not want them demolished or changed," he said. "But as the country goes on secularizing, there is less and less money available to keep the buildings going."
In much of Western Europe, church attendance has been slipping since the 1960s, dropping particularly fast in the 1980s. Among the Dutch, the decline has been especially steep. While in 1960, 18 percent of the Dutch said they belonged to no church or religion, in 1995 that number had reached 40 percent, according to the national Bureau of Statistics.
The most precipitous drop has been among Protestants, who are split into various denominations. Catholics remain the single largest group, making up 33 percent.
The dismantling of the churches has produced anxiety and soul-searching among parishioners, even in a country that tends to be more practical than emotional. Religion may seem irrelevant to many people, but the power of its images and symbolism endures.
"People were offended at first and said things like: How dare you violate the church," said Willem van Vliet, who in 1984 bought a large, unused Protestant church in the heart of Hoorn, a town north of Amsterdam.
The century-old, neo-Renaissance building had been closed for 20 years, and the local "save the church" group had not managed to collect enough money for basic repairs. Van Vliet and his partners paid $2.6 million for the hulking church and parsonage. The heritage foundation and the provincial government put up a similar amount for repairs and conversion work.
"We had a lot of sleepless nights," said van Vliet as he recalled overhauling the slate roof, propping up four towers and worrying about painstaking tasks like restoring leaded glass windows, chimneys and ornamented pillars.
Today the church has five floors. Shops occupy the first two. In the soaring height of the nave, van Vliet built 18 apartments.
"I'm proud as can be," he said. "We were so criticized, and now we have a waiting list of 80 families wanting to live here."
One tenant, a young woman, said she was not religious but loved the idea of living in a church and sleeping under its slanted roof. For the neighborhood, there is another kind of comfort: up in its tower, the old carillon still chimes the familiar tunes.
Amsterdam, the nation's capital, has more than a dozen former churches with a new purpose. The Vondel Church, an elegant neo-Gothic structure named after a hallowed Dutch writer, houses several discreet offices with only tiny name plates on the door. But a few blocks away, the Holland Diving shop has painted the outside of an unused Protestant church black, hung up large signs, replaced the pews with racks of wetsuits and flippers and built a swimming pool in the apse.
"The church elders knew of our plans, and they accepted it," said Lothar de Bruijn, the manager. "But when the pastor came to take away the organ, he had tears in his eyes."
Of the country's close to 40 Orthodox synagogues, only about a dozen are in use. Almost three out of every four Jews who lived in the Netherlands before World War II died in the Holocaust. Today many do not practice the faith.
The Roman Catholic Church is clearly the most reluctant to sell. A Catholic church is considered to occupy consecrated ground, explained Leo Klok, the head of finance for the Archdiocese of Utrecht.
"We must protect the dignity of the building, and that can be difficult," Klok said. "We make agreements with the government or a buyer, and they are not always met. So against our wishes a few churches have become offices, dance halls, and shops."
More than 125 Catholic churches have been closed since 1973, but as many smaller ones have been opened that allow for more versatile use as community centers. The old buildings have been much in demand as mosques, because of their large size. But the archdiocese hesitates to sell them to Islamic groups, after a few "difficult" experiences, Klok said.
"Islam has many currents, and you end up dealing not with a religious group but with the government behind them," he said.