Petrus Johannes Meindaerts

Meindaerts was ordained to the priesthood in Ireland by Roman Catholic Bishop Jacob Fagan of Meath, Ireland.[1] According to C.B. Moss, Meindaerts arrived in Ireland in the late summer of 1716 and was arrested on suspicion of being a Jacobite spy, avoiding imprisonment by convincing an officer familiar with Louvain that he was a student at the university there.[2]

Meindaerts subsequently served as Archpriest of Leeuwarden and a Dean of Friesland.

Following the death of Theodorus van der Croon, Archbishop of Utrecht, on June 9, 1739, the Chapter of Utrecht elected Meindaerts as bishop-elect. On October 18, 1739, he was consecrated by Bishop Dominique Marie Varlet, former Roman Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Babylon.[3] Meindaerts was subsequently excommunicated for this act by Benedict XIV.

At the time, 52 parishes acknowledged the jurisdiction of Meindaerts: 33 in the Diocese of Utrecht, 17 in Haarlem, one in Leeuwarden, and one in Nordstrand, Germany.

After Varlet's death on May 14, 1742, Meindaerts set himself to the task of ensuring apostolic succession within the Old Catholic Church. On September 2, 1742, he consecrated Hieronymus de Bock as Bishop of Haarlem, a see left vacant by the Roman Catholic Church since 1587. Upon Bock's death, he consecrated John van Stiphout as Bishop of Haarlem on July 11, 1745.

After three failed attempts of reunion with the Roman Catholic Church, Meindaerts consecrated a third bishop on January 25, 1758: Bartholomew John Byeveld, who served as Bishop of Deventer, a titular bishopric with no parishes. The consecration was denounced by Benedict XIV, and Meindaerts responded with a letter that was translated to French, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Three editions of his French letter were reprinted.

In 1763, Meindaerts convened the first synod in Utrecht since 1565, for the purpose of condemning the work of Pierre Le Clere, a French subdeacon living in Amsterdam. A total of twenty clerics gathered for the synod at the St. Gertrude Cathedral in Utrecht. The synod asserted the divine right of monarchs and condemned several works. It also approved 24 canons, including the warning that those who did not receive the Church's sacrament of Confirmation risked salvation—a canon that is interesting insofar as no Roman Catholic bishop celebrated the sacrament in the Dutch Republic from 1703 to 1827, thus creating an opportunity for the bishops of the Old Catholic Church, who were the sole dispensers of this now-necessary sacrament. C.B. Moss says, “The acts of the synod were very well received throughout Roman Catholic Europe, and many [Roman Catholic] bishops sent letters of congratulations and communion to Archbishop Meindaerts.”[4]

Moss, C.B. (1948). The Old Catholic Movement: Its Origins and History. Berkeley, CA: The Apocryphal Press.