Andrew Wouters

Andrew Wouters, also recorded as Andries Wouters or Andreas Wouters, was a Dutch secular (diocesan) priest of the sixteenth century and one of the Nineteen Martyrs of Gorkum. He served as parish priest of Heinenoord, a village in the Hoeksche Waard in the County of Holland, in the period when the Dutch Revolt against Habsburg Spain was beginning to spread through the Low Countries. He did not belong to a religious order; several of his fellow martyrs were Franciscans from the Gorinchem friary, together with members of other orders and additional secular clergy.

Catholic historical and hagiographical accounts openly record that Wouters’s earlier life as a priest was morally irregular. He was reputed to have lived in concubinage. This reputation later furnished his Calvinist captors with material for mockery. Tradition holds that when they reproached him with his past, he distinguished personal sin from doctrinal apostasy, insisting that whatever his faults of chastity he had never been a heretic.

In late June 1572 Gorinchem was taken by the Watergeuzen (Sea Beggars). Catholic priests and religious in the town and nearby parishes were arrested, confined, and pressed to reject papal authority and the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. After days of abuse they were moved by boat to Brielle. There, during the night of 8–9 July 1572, nineteen of them were hanged in a turf-shed attached to a former Augustinian monastery, on the authority of William II de la Marck, lord of Lumey.

Wouters was among those who refused to recant. The corpses were left hanging and afterwards thrown into a ditch. Remains recovered in the seventeenth century were treated as relics and widely distributed. The group was beatified by Pope Clement X in 1675 and canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1867. Their feast is kept on 9 July. Andrew Wouters is commemorated as a priest of imperfect life who nevertheless died rather than deny the Catholic faith.