The Catholic Church in the Netherlands () is part of the worldwide Catholic Church under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. Its primate is the Metropolitan Archbishop of Utrecht, currently Willem Jacobus Eijk since 2008. In 2015 Catholicism was the single largest religion of the Netherlands, forming some 23% of the Dutch people, based on in-depth interviewing, down from 40% in the 1960s. Although the number of Catholics in the Netherlands has decreased significantly in recent decades, the Catholic Church remains today the largest religious group in the Netherlands. Once known as a Protestant country, Catholicism surpassed Protestantism after the First World War, and in 2012 the Netherlands was only 10% Dutch Protestant (down from 60% in the early 20th century; defections are primarily due to rising lack of affiliation that started to occur two decades earlier than in Dutch Catholicism). There are an estimated 3.7 million Catholics registered (2021) by the Catholic Church in the Netherlands, 21.7% of the population, down from more than 40% in the 1970s. The Catholic Church in the Netherlands has suffered an official membership loss of 650,000 members between 2003 (4,532,000 pers. / 27.9% overall population) and 2015 (3,882,000 pers. / 22.9% overall population). The number of people registered as Catholic in the Netherlands continues to decrease, roughly by half a percent annually. North Brabant and Limburg have been historically the most Catholic parts of the Netherlands, and Catholicism and some of its traditions now form a cultural identity rather than a religious identity for people there. The vast majority of the Catholic population is now largely irreligious in practice (in line with the rest of the Dutch population). Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands in 2007 showed that only 27% could be regarded as theist; 55% as ietsist, deist, or agnostic; and 17% as atheist. In 2015 only 13% of self-identified Dutch Catholics believe in the existence of heaven, 17% in a personal God and fewer than half believe that Jesus was the Son of God or sent by God. Church attendance by Catholics has decreased in recent decades to less than 98,600 or 2.7% of Dutch Catholics in a regular weekend of May 2022. In December 2011 a report was published by Wim Deetman, a former Dutch Minister of Education, detailing widespread child abuse within the Catholic Church in the Netherlands: 1,800 instances of abuse "by clergy or volunteers