Multatuli as a Catholic (for some days? months?)

 Eduard Douwes Dekker, better known as Multatuli (1820-1887) is best for his novel Max Havelaar (1860) about a colonial official in the period 1840-1855 who was not corrupt, who defended the rights of poor people against the Dutch colonial system, but also against the native Javanese feudal rulers. He is generally considered as the most prominent Dutch author, at least for the 19th century. Besides the great novel about the basic evil of the colonial system, he wrote theatre plays, essays on many subjects (Ideas) and even more letters. The Complete Works/Volledige Werken count 25 volumes, each of some 800 pages! After being against colonialism, he also was the first famous, self-confident and aggressive atheist of the Netherlands, fighting religion in many of his pages. However, there was a development in this personality and even a short 'Roman Catholic period'. 

He was born in a Mennonite (anabaptist) family, where baptism of children was not the practice.To become member of the religious community was a personal choice. It was quite common to be baptised at the age of 18 or even later. Although Multatuli was educated in a pious Mennonite family, he never was baptised in this church. His father was a captain on a boat sailing to Indonesia and at the age of 18 he arrived in Batavia where he became a minor official at the finance ministry of the colony. The young man here fell in love with a Catholic girl, Caroline Versteegh, who probably was in a boarding school in the colonial capital. Her father worked in a plantation, 30 km south of Semarang. It would be impossible at that time to marry the Catholic girl, without converting to Catholicism and so we may understand that Eduard Douwes Dekker (later better known as Multatuli) was baptised on Saturday 28 August 1841 in the chapel of the government hospital of Batavia (by lack of a proper church or even Cathedral). The father of Caroline, however, did not take this conversion serious: Multatuli was fond of fighting and gambling, had serious financial debts and showed lack of discipline in some of his duties. The marriage never was effectuated.

There is an interesting article on the contacts of Multatuli with Prefect Apostolic Joannes Scholten (1797-1865). In mid-1841 Multatuli showed much sympathy for this 'gentle and nice person' who was already in bad health. During the time Scholten suffered of typhus, the young official Douwes Dekker took care for him, watched him at his bed. Also several letters of the correspondance between the two have been saved. As late as the early 1870s, thirty years after their meetings in Batavia, Multatuli wrote four nice and emotional pages in his Ideas (Volledige Werken VI:243-246), in which he praised Scholten as the brave and helping army chapain during the Java War. - There is a special journal Over Multatuli, where Wilfried Dierick wrote an interesting article 'Een 'roomsch' intermezzo' (vol 17:1986, 28-41). While reading this (also through the  summary in the biography of 2002 by Dick van der Meulen), I saw again that my three volumes on Catholics in Indonesia, 1808-2010 have very little information about the European and Eurasian Catholics in the colony. I concentrated on the start of the great Indonesian group of Catholics, although they were until 1920 still a minority! So,  this may be seen as a small correction to my earlier research on Catholics in Indonesia.