Petrus Johannes Meindaerts

After Varlet's death on 14 May 1742, Meindaerts set himself to the task of ensuring apostolic succession within the Old Catholic Church. On 2 September 1742 he consecrated Hieronymus de Bock as Bishop of Haarlem, a see left vacant by the Roman Catholic Church since 1587. Upon Bock's death, he consecrated John van Stiphout as Bishop of Haarlem on 11 July 1745.

After three failed attempts of reunion with the Roman Catholic Church, Meindaerts consecrated a third bishop on 25 January 1758: Bartholomew John Byeveld, who served as Bishop of Deventer, a titular bishopric with no parishes. The consecration was denounced by Benedict XIV, and Meindaerts responded with a letter that was translated to French, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Three editions of his French letter were reprinted.

In 1763, Meindaerts convened the first synod in Utrecht since 1565, for the purpose of condemning the work of Pierre Le Clere, a French subdeacon living in Amsterdam. A total of twenty clerics gathered for the synod at the St. Gertrude Cathedral in Utrecht. The synod asserted the divine right of monarchs and condemned several works. It also approved 24 canons, including the warning that those who did not receive the Church's sacrament of Confirmation risked salvation—a canon that is interesting insofar as no Roman Catholic bishop celebrated the sacrament in the Dutch Republic from 1703 to 1827, thus creating an opportunity for the bishops of the Old Catholic Church, who were the sole dispensers of this now-necessary sacrament. C.B. Moss says, “The acts of the synod were very well received throughout Roman Catholic Europe, and many [Roman Catholic] bishops sent letters of congratulations and communion to Archbishop Meindaerts.”^[4]

Moss, C.B. (1948). The Old Catholic Movement: Its Origins and History. Berkeley, CA: The Apocryphal Press. ISBN 9780976402596.