Catholic Power in the Netherlands

Dutch Catholics long constituted by far the most cohesive political subculture in Western Europe. For nearly half a century virtually all Catholics in the Netherlands supported a single political party - the Catholic party - resisting appeals from both the left and the right. Then in the mid-1960s their allegiance began to crumble; by 1972 only a small minority of Dutch Catholics still voted for the party and a few years later it had ceased to exist.