Het buitenkerkelijke succes van de christelijke zielzorg

Samenvatting

This article considers contemporary spiritual care in the Netherlands as the result of a development that started off with ecclesial initiatives. Through ecumenical cooperation, establishing a common professional organization, and initiating specialized training trajectories, priests, pastoral workers, ministers, rabbis, and humanistic counsellors have contributed to the development of a separate profession: spiritual care. Often these ‘new style’ chaplains work outside their own denomination. What started as an ecclesial service to patients, soldiers, and inmates has evolved into a new, precarious profession, sometimes only loosely connected with organized religion. Rather than an instance, however, of secularization or of a spiritual revolution, this persistence of the care of souls is regarded as a successful dissemination of the ecclesial tradition in the secular domain against the background of liquid modernity.