19 Facts About Huub Oosterhuis

Huub Oosterhuis is mainly known for his contribution to Christian music and liturgy in Dutch and in German, used in both Protestant and Catholic churches.

Huub Oosterhuis authored over 60 books and over 700 hymns, songs, psalms, and prayers.

Huub Oosterhuis attended a high school there and joined the Society of Jesus in 1954.

Huub Oosterhuis was ordained as a priest at the Basilica of Saint Servatius in Maastricht in 1964.

From 1954, inspired by Che Guevara who said that churches have the potential to transform the social structure of society, Oosterhuis combined his religious position with political activism.

In 1965, Huub Oosterhuis was appointed priest of the student parish in Amsterdam, Studentenekklesia.

Huub Oosterhuis became one of the major supporters of ecumenism, following the modernist interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.

Huub Oosterhuis started out to rewrite the liturgy and make it acceptable to all.

Huub Oosterhuis left the Catholic Church and functioned as an Independent Catholic priest, in charge of a church in Amsterdam, for about forty years.

Huub Oosterhuis remained focused on writing liturgy, poetry and essays.

Huub Oosterhuis founded "De Rode Hoed", a discussion centre in Amsterdam in 1990, for his student organisation, and was its director until 1998.

Huub Oosterhuis died on 9 April 2023, at age 89, after a short illness.

Walter Meinrad, a German theologian and musicologist, thinks that the songs by Huub Oosterhuis will leave a lasting impression because they serve no fashion but touch existential human conditions and express tensions such as life and death, doubt and insecurities.

Huub Oosterhuis wrote over 60 books and more than 700 hymns, songs, psalms, and prayers.

In 2002, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands asked Huub Oosterhuis to deliver the eulogy at the funeral of her husband, Prince-Consort Claus von Amsberg, a longtime personal friend, in the New Church in Delft: Claus and Huub Oosterhuis had first met in 1968 and he visited the royal family regularly.

Huub Oosterhuis ultimately chose the less-known Socialist Party, as he viewed it as being closer to socialist ideals.

Huub Oosterhuis made a translation of the Torah together with Alex van Heusden, which was released in five separate books, as an attempt to translate the first five books of the Bible as closely to contemporary Dutch as possible without losing the style of the original Hebrew text.

The first hymn by Huub Oosterhuis was "Wie als een God wil leven", in 1965.

Huub Oosterhuis received the German ecumenical Predigtpreis for his life's work in 2014.