The founders of this house of worship were the Augustinians. In 1513 these monks established a chapel
A small church that is not a parish church. It may be part of a larger entity such as a hospital, school, or an alms-house, or it may stand alone.
An enclosed part of a church with its own altar.
, which was the onset of building a monasteryComplex of buildings in which members of a religious order live together. They follow the rule of their founder. The oldest monastic orders are the Carthusians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians [and their female counterparts]. Note: Benedictines, Premonstratensians, and Cistercians [and their female counterparts] live in abbeys; Jesuits in houses. and this church. Because of their sympathy for their protesting fellow brotherA male religious who is not a priest. Martin Luther, Margareth of Austria, governor of the Netherlands, ordered the closing of the monastery in 1522 and one year later two monks were executed in Brussels.

In 1529 the building was consecrated as a parish church. Slowly, but tirelessly, the parishioners overcame heavy setbacks such as the iconoclasm (1566), the demolition of the choirIn a church with a cruciform floor plan, the part of the church that lies on the side of the nave opposite to the transept. The main altar is in the choir. and the transeptThe transept forms, as it were, the crossbeam of the cruciform floor plan. The transept consists of two semi transepts, each of which protrudes from the nave on the left and right. by the Calvinists (1581), and the collapse of the tower (1755). With a sense of artistic beauty they rebuilt and enlarged their church into a monumental ‘house of God’.

The church and its furnishings survived the French Revolution thanks to the oath of an ecclesiastically disobedient priestIn the Roman Catholic Church, the priest is an unmarried man ordained as a priest by the bishop, which gives him the right to administer the six other sacraments: baptism, confirmation, confession, Eucharist, marriage, and the anointing of the sick.!  Moreover a number of works of art from former convent churches were recycled, such as the baroque high altarThe altar is the central piece of furniture used in the Eucharist. Originally, an altar used to be a sacrificial table. This fits in with the theological view that Jesus sacrificed himself, through his death on the cross, to redeem mankind, as symbolically depicted in the painting “The Adoration of the Lamb” by the Van Eyck brothers. In modern times the altar is often described as “the table of the Lord”. Here the altar refers to the table at which Jesus and his disciples were seated at the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper. Just as Jesus and his disciples did then, the priest and the faithful gather around this table with bread and wine., and baroque works of art were added, such as the monumental pulpit (1821) and the Way of the Cross (ca. 1850).

In the 1970s the church was completely restored.