Bert made this painting on the occasion of a visit to the town of Doel in Belgium in May 2022. It shows the interior of the church (adjusted by me) with some figures in the foreground that refer to the title. Doel was once a quiet village in the Scheldepolder. For several years now, most of the houses have been empty and the streets are full of graffiti and street art. The village is completely deserted except for a dozen residents. Little by little it becomes a ghost town. At the beginning of the 1970s, Doel still had 1400 inhabitants and now only about ten. Many houses and other buildings have fallen into disrepair, but the Church of Our Lady of the Ascension shown here has been preserved in good condition. The church was thoroughly restored between 1996 and 1998 after damage caused by subsidence. The solid ground layer in Doel is about 11 meters deep, while the wooden posts on which the church rests only reach 7 meters deep. Today the church is very crooked. The figures in the painting also refer to possible blasphemous scenes. The term blasphemy or blasphemy is also used for acts that go against the faith and therefore fall under a religious crime. Under the guise of protecting the faith, individual freedoms are sometimes restricted, including freedom of speech and expression. The priest who beats the two children during the passage because of alleged blasphemy (a - fantasized - marriage between two children) refers to a true story from Bert's childhood. The whole story can be read in a blog about the (hypocritical) Roman life (2) on the website of the now deceased friend of Bert, Ton van der Pennen: https://tonvandervangen.nl/?p=15974 The leaning church of Doel also symbolizes the hypocrisy of labeling all kinds of actions and behavior by the Roman church as 'blasphemy'. Are the nuns at the bottom right an example of this?
