Theology, friendship, and the inner life - meet the youngest Dominican in the Netherlands

"Evangelization starts from within...it’s an inner life that overflows."

The Dominican order is among the most prominent religious orders in the Catholic Church.

Some of its friars - most notably St. Thomas Aquinas - have been among the greatest Catholic philosophers and theologians in history, and were among the first defenders of the rights of indigenous people in the Americas.

However, many Dominican provinces saw a profound decline in vocations after the Second Vatican Council.

One example is the Netherlands. The province went from sending missionaries all over the world in the 1950s to shutting down its novitiate and then its study house for lack of vocations in the 1990s.

But some provinces are now beginning to see new vocations. One of these is Fr. Stefan Ansinger OP, who was ordained in Rotterdam on June 15. At just 30 years old, he is the youngest priest in the Netherlands 

Fr. Ansinger is well-known for his YouTube channel OPChant, in which he makes Gregorian chant videos in the Dominican tradition. Ansinger received The Pillar in his convent in Rotterdam for a conversation about the Dominican contemporary history in the Netherlands, Gregorian chant, Thomism, Edward Schillebeeckx, and evangelization in a secularized world. 

That conversation is below. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Fr. Stefan Ansinger (Courtesy picture).

Many Dominican provinces, especially the Dutch, had a significantly progressive shift after Vatican II, but that seems to be changing, at least in the Netherlands. How did that come about?

After World War II, we had so many brothers in the Netherlands that we were sending them away as missionaries.

Around those years, Karol Wojtyla came to the Netherlands as a tourist and said, “Well, all these structures are wonderful, but where’s the Holy Spirit?” So, he foresaw that the Dutch Church was weaker than it seemed.

At Vatican II, quite a few Dominican brothers participated as advisors, most famously, Edward Schillebeeckx. The problem was that for quite a few brothers, the Council didn’t go far enough. So, they started their own theology based on the “spirit of the council” and that is difficult, because it alienated them from the universal Church.

This kind of spirituality and philosophy brought no vocations. There was a push for a Church run completely by laypeople, no priests at all. Everyone had to be equal.

There were no vocations because they were saying that we didn’t need any priests. We didn’t need any brothers. We wanted a lay Church. So, they had to close the novitiate, because there were no novices.

But, if I’m honest with you, I don’t look back that much. I know where we stand now.

And where are you now?

We only have a convent here in Rotterdam. There’s a house for older brothers in Berg en Dal, near the German border, but formally the only community is here in Rotterdam.

We’re now together with the Belgians.

The Dutch and the Belgians are not together in many things.

That’s true (laughs).

Most vocations in the province are coming from the Netherlands. We have one or two people joining each year and going to the novitiate.

So, we really want to concentrate on one place, and this place is already full. So, if we have new vocations, which is likely, then we need to start a second place in the Netherlands, but we don't know yet where.

There’s a Dutch Dominican priest that it’s coming soon to the Netherlands that is a year younger than me, so I only have a few months left as the youngest priest in the country.

I think the Dominican life is attractive for young men in this situation of crisis in the world. You live a contemplative community life to study together the great theology of the Church, and then give the fruits of contemplation to the world.

And going back to Schillebeeckx, people don’t really know about his early theology, because most of it hasn’t been translated from Dutch. When I read the theology he taught in the ‘50s, you see this unique kind of Thomism that is very informed by history.

Then, I see Schillebeeckx’s development later and I find it so sad because when we speak about Schillebeeckx, people forget that in his early days he wrote great theology. His doctoral thesis is a 500-page masterpiece on the sacraments that is still taught by the Dominicans in the Angelicum and Freiburg.

So, whenever I hear people criticizing Schillebeeckx, I understand, but also you must be careful because there’s so much richness in his early works.

Usually, what is translated is only the post-Vatican II, more progressive things.

Exactly. For me, his early works are a real inspiration. I’m taking his courses on Christology and his class notes for a retreat/vacation I’m taking next week.

Well, that’s a way to rest (laughs).

He was an encyclopedic mind. If you look at the footnotes of his works, he’s read everything, both the Patristic sources and the contemporary theologians, in all their source languages: in German, French, Italian, English, etc.

We don’t do that anymore; we are not able to read like that.

So, even if you don’t like his post-Vatican II development, I think he deserves respect. He’s part of a different generation with a breadth of knowledge you don’t find anymore.

And this historically informed Thomism he defended in the ‘50s helps you to become sensitive to the modus operandi of Saint Thomas, precisely because this is what Thomas did.

It’s really different to merely read an article in an Aquinas’ work than to enter into his spirit.

First and foremost, if you don’t have a real, living relationship with Christ through Holy Scripture, I don’t know how you can call yourself a Thomist. Every morning, Aquinas did nothing else but write commentaries on the Scriptures.

If you’re merely repeating him, it’s artificial. People notice it’s not coming from the heart. I think that Aquinas would agree that there should be a correspondence between the inner and outer word. There needs to be what we call today authenticity, coherence. Otherwise, it’s just me babbling around and mechanically repeating truths.

This is what is meant in Scripture when people say that Christ speaks with authority; because it’s coming from an inner disposition, from a spiritual life.

Fr. Stefan Ansinger preaching (Credit: Diocese of Rotterdam) 

What are you up to right now?

So, I live in this community here in Rotterdam, we’re six brothers in total. The main pastoral assignment we have is the Rotterdam students’ chaplaincy. That means we give courses and catechesis during the week, and we have the students’ Mass on Sunday, which usually attracts about 200 students.

With a few other brothers, I also would love to set up a Dominican lay movement in the Netherlands for all the students and young professionals who are interested in Dominican theology and spirituality.

The idea is not just having meetings about theology, but to get like-minded people together and have a good lunch, build up a community together, and then have someone give a presentation, so people also must invest their time and their effort to study, and then end with a meal and compline. I saw this done in Freiburg where I studied for five years, and it was very popular.

We want to give people intellectual foundations in the faith, and to let them think for themselves but within the intellectual tradition of the Church.

It is beautiful that we have so many Catholic initiatives on the internet nowadays. But at the same time, you must give people the tools to think for themselves.

The problem is that people only repeat what they hear in these podcasts and channels, and mechanically repeating what you have heard on a show is not enough.

The idea is that you, with your community, try to discover how to think. And then when they go home, they can learn to think with Scripture and the faith, even if you are not there. We need to give them the tools to find real foundations in their lives.

We need deep theological thinking, directly with the sources, but that’s not for everyone. We need people who are trained in theology, but not only theology students—people who work and study in all domains of society but have an understanding of what it means to think as a Catholic, with solid foundations and without being ideological.

Why do you think there are more young Dutch converts than a few years ago?

I speak with all kinds of young people here, not only Catholics, and I feel there is a window of opportunity at this moment. We had a record number of adult baptisms here in Rotterdam this year, and in many parts of the Netherlands, like Leiden or Nijmegen too.

You see that, with all the problems in the world, young people are seeking grounding and they don’t see religion as problematic anymore, it’s interesting again.

In the Netherlands, it’s usually our parents’ generation that threw everything away, so now it's the time of young people to rediscover what religion, and specifically, Catholicism means. And there’s real openness, which is something I didn’t see a few years ago. It’s new.

People have less prejudices against Christianity, they just don’t know anything at all about it. It’s becoming exotic and interesting once again.

Tell me your story. How did you end up in a Dominican habit?

I'm from a big Catholic family, we’re six children. Catholicism was always a part of our life and was the joy of our family—it still is.

My mother is a musician in the church, very much interested in the liturgy.

My father is a physiotherapist, and more intellectual, so he really took care of our catechesis. He was a catechist and spent about 10 years giving bible courses around the Netherlands.

Every month or every couple of weeks we got together on the couch with my father, and we spoke about the teachings of the Church, how to pray, all these things.

We had this very frequent catechesis that helped me go through secondary school.

Because you didn’t go to a Catholic school, but a regular, secular, Dutch public school. Right?

Indeed, a normal public school. There, I started hearing all kinds of questions and I found them a bit difficult, but my father gave answers.

I remember the weekends often, we would sit together at lunch for three hours, just speaking about the faith. And it was always so natural. There was nothing forced, no ideology involved.

It was just that after a week of work, on Saturday we sat down to have a good lunch and we automatically started to talk about Christ or about the Church.

So, when I was around 12, I started feeling this very strong longing during the liturgy that I wanted to do the same thing the priest was doing.

Of course, at the time I had the ideal parish: it had a lot of young people, a big community.

There you see that vocation usually is a superabundance of parish life.

So, when it was time to go to the university, I spoke with my parents about my vocation, because I was wondering whether to go to seminary and pursue ecclesiastical studies or get a normal college education first. My parents told me it was wise to first do some normal studies and my father thought that if you work for the public sector, you will always find something, so I decided to study public management.

In my second year, I started attending the Nijmegen Catholic Student Association, and I met other people discerning their vocation, and found a good social life. At the end of that year, I became a chairman [of the association] for a couple of years.

I knew I would become a priest; I just didn’t know how.

So, I tried to live a more intense Christian life, going to weekly or biweekly confession, going to daily Mass, and trying to pray parts of the office. But that didn’t stop me from having a typical student life with late nights and good drinks with friends.

And even now as a Dominican, this hasn’t completely left me. I still love to go and have drinks and deep conversations with my friends. My life hasn’t changed that much.I pray, I study, I go out with friends. I’m just my own daily Mass now (laughs).

But I didn’t know back then that the Dominicans were my destiny. I was going to the seminaries in the Netherlands, but I wasn’t convinced. Most of them had very few seminarians, and I wanted a more intense community and social life.

It was very important for me to have an active apostolic life. That was very important to me, to have a “going-out” spirit.

I also needed a movement inward, with a strong community, a community that sang together, prayed the office together, not just on my own.

I think Dominican life is prophetic in this sense. In our individualistic age, people are looking for a community that sustains them. We have that here.

But you need some contact with the culture and the world in order to baptize it or bring it to Christ.

Fr. Ansinger is well-known for his YouTube channel, OPChant. (Courtesy picture).

What led you specifically to the Dominicans?

At some point, I spoke with Fr. Geelen, the chaplain of Radboud University, and I told him what I was noticing in the seminaries. And I had this idea of religious life as merely monastic life, which I love, but it was not my thing. I wanted a more active life.

You see, vocation always has to do with nature. What are the talents that God gave you and that you have developed? They usually show you the path and state of life where you can become joyful, not in a superficial sense, but in the joy that comes from the Holy Spirit.

I discovered the Dominicans, but I was also a bit hesitant because I knew of the older generation of Dominicans and the tensions with younger Dominicans. But I saw that there was a new group of Dominicans who joined and restarted the novitiate in Cambridge, and it was a good sign for me. I spoke with one of the brothers there who was Dutch and came back for Christmas for a couple of days and I was so impressed that I said “this is it.”

How do you deal with theological differences and different spiritual sensibilities among your brothers?

In this house you have lots of different theological opinions. But that doesn’t mean you can’t live together as brothers.

The first thing I’d say is that you should never be afraid of different opinions. In all his articles, Thomas Aquinas starts with a certain thesis. Then, he looks at all possible objections and then says sed contra and provides his own arguments. So, it’s okay to have an intellectual discussion at the table.

So, of course, it’d be problematic if brothers would say things against the faith or something like that. But most of the time it's a question of preferences or insights. So, you can really profit from these discussions and come to a greater understanding of Truth.

I think this is very important because many Catholics have not been instructed in the faith and others just repeat what the Catechism says. Don’t get me wrong, the Catechism is very rich, but you have to think things through. You must see the other options, and other people’s opinions, not to defend wrong positions, but to have a real understanding.

The problem comes when you are afraid of even thinking about the other positions.

Dominican life is sometimes just a peer review with real persons at the table (laughs). You can do that academically, sending in your articles, or you can have a real-life discussion like in the scholastic debates, which sometimes were very tense and long.

And most of the time, there’s quite a lot of freedom. So, I think it would only be problematic if it would endanger your spiritual or liturgical life. But I haven’t experienced any of that.

You mentioned authenticity earlier, which is a value the modern world appreciates and seems ever-more important in evangelization. You’ve been on a public TV show and its podcast a couple of times, so you’ve really had the chance to show the Church to people who know nothing of it. How did that go?

Well, I was just walking around in my habit near Utrecht’s train station the day of my final course, near Christmas last year, so I decided to have some nice frietjes with my friends. All the sudden, a man with a microphone appears in front of me, and asked why I was dressed like that.

And that’s how it happened, but then they invited me to the podcast to have a longer conversation.

I’m used to being in public with my habit. If you go out in public with your habit, people notice it, especially because you have a young face. People are not used to seeing anyone in a habit, and if they do, they expect it would be someone with gray hair. So, when you see a young person in a Dominican habit, that’s already a conversation starter.

This show is a quite popular show for young people, and they talk about all these kinds of young people problems, you know, relationships, loneliness, studies, etc. So, I had to adapt to that kind of audience. It’s a really quick kind of interview, even a little bit rude every now and then, but they ask very basic stuff. It’s a ping-pong. They just ask you if you can’t get married and these kinds of things.

But then they also asked for a podcast interview, which was a very intense interview lasting one hour. Then you get all kinds of questions, some a bit ridiculous, like if I was allowed to drink alcohol, and some others a bit deeper, such as how I live my celibacy. But this shows you people don’t have any idea at all of how the life of a priest or a religious brother is.

Interviews like this are more about form, it’s more about showing a loving face, presenting yourself joyfully.

You have a famous YouTube channel, OPChant. How did it grow so much?

The YouTube channel came about four or five years ago. It was an initiative I took with another brother in Freiburg, because we Dominicans have a specific type of Gregorian chant. So, we wanted to sing more Gregorian chant, but we didn’t have any examples to follow.

So, we went on a retreat in Chalais, near the Grand Chartreuse, in the Grenoble region in France, and we decided to take a camera and a recording device with us to record a famous Gregorian Requiem and some other pieces, like a Te Deum. And the Te Deum reached 100,000 views.

So we thought there was an audience for this and we decided to continue the project and record everything for Advent, like the O Antiphons, which made the channel very popular. We started having interview requests and a brother started writing to news outlets in the U.S., and within a few weeks we were everywhere.

Then, sadly this brother left the Order, which was really difficult for me. So, I had to search for other people, which made the project more international. Now we have people in Venice, Poland, and England who also participate in the project.

But now I’m trying to reform the project a little bit. I want to create catechetical videos about the most important hymns of the Church, so we don’t only sing them but understand the theology behind each and every line.

How do you evangelize in a secularized environment like the Netherlands?

A lot of it is phenomenology.

So, you indeed are the postmodern friar (laughs), as your brothers call you.

Exactly (laughs).

What I mean is that when you are in the train, with your habit, and you care for people, and your face is glowing with the love of Christ, you are going to attract more people than when you are sad, without your habit, and sitting with a suit and tie. That's just something that really helps.

Prayer makes you more available, prayer gives you this openness of mind, but also transforms your entire person in a way that attracts people if you do it in the right way. Prayer is always openness. It's not closed.

Then, you need to meet people where they are. It’s the small things. If I’m going somewhere I could say that I’ll take my car, and it’ll be more comfortable, but then I will not speak to anyone. If I take the train, there will always be someone asking questions.

And then, we must look at the things that young people are occupied with at this moment and what can we say as the Church about them - What can we say about technology, about ecology?

And it’s not simply about going with the fashion of the time, but realizing that the Church really has something to say about this. The most important thing I think Pope Francis said in Laudato si’ is that we need conversion of the heart to become grateful again for the fact that nature is a gift from God.

The hallmark of Christianity is gratitude. This is something we have to learn again.

And Francis in Laudato si’ is very much speaking about this disposition of gratitude.

People should be able to see that we’re Christians merely by speaking or looking at us. You should be so much on fire that it should be quickly noticeable.

When you see the communities that are growing and have a lot of baptisms, it’s not just about the liturgy. Liturgy is very important, but it’s always, also, a very strong community with real friendship.

It’s about having real friends. We go for a beer together, you hear their real stories and real difficulties, and you give them real advice, and you see them grow.

But evangelization starts from within, when you live a holy life, the way you speak will be different.

Apostolate is a superabundance of inner life.

Indeed, it’s an inner life that overflows. I was thinking about this when I saw the prayer of ordination, that sort of says that God fulfills what He already started in you, which is beautiful because it puts God at the center of everything you do. Everything is in Christ, and we only must work with Him and fulfill what is already in Christ.

Christian life, done the right way, is fulfilling what is already in Christ, and in His body.

And this helps you realize in this world where people suffer so much, that when we look at the Cross, we’re not looking as a sign of torture, but at our very identity.

Our generation has a very superficial idea of joy and happiness, so when crosses come, people crumble. But when we find this identity between the cross of Christ and our personal cross, and we look at it every day, meditate on it every day, it will become a fruitful cross.

The Mass is sacrificial love. It’s an offering of praise, it’s a sacrifice of praise, which means that even on the Cross, Christ is still praising. This is what the martyr does. The martyr is a witness to this love regardless of how terrible the outward circumstances are. This should also be said of us Christians.