The Church of Utrecht

The Catholic Church in the Dutch Republic was a church without legal standing, tolerated in hidden chapels, and its clergy had absorbed a good deal of the Jansenist temper of the age. When Rome refused for years to confirm any archbishop for Utrecht, the cathedral chapter fell back on what it held to be its own ancient right and, in 1723, elected Cornelius Steenoven itself. A French missionary bishop, Dominique Marie Varlet — himself already in trouble with Rome — consecrated him in 1724, which gave the small church a valid succession and a permanent breach with the papacy in the same act. It stayed Catholic in everything else, went on electing its own bishops, and survived on a few thousand members for a century and a half.