In Dutch with the Vatican

The sources of radical and rebellious Roman Catholic thinking used to be the industrial missions in urban France or the theological faculties of German universities. Lately, the fount of ideas that may skirt heresy -- or may become the accepted reshaping of church thinking -- is the staid and sober Netherlands.

The latest incident to alarm Rome's Holy Office involves a lively magazine called De Nieuwe Linie (The New Frontier). Owned by Catholic laymen but numbering three Jesuits among its editors, the magazine has within the past two years become one of the most provocative in Europe. It has run articles discussing the moral licitness of the birth-control pill for Catholics* and has suggested a change in church rules limiting mixed marriages. Last February two priests used its pages to question clerical celibacy. A month later, a Catholic layman raised questions about the doctrine of transubstantiation, which holds that the bread and wine change into Christ's body and blood at the consecration of the Mass.

A Box on the Ear. A report on the articles was sent to Rome by the cautiously conservative Apostolic Internuncio, Archbishop Giuseppe Beltrami. In April the Jesuit General, Father Jean Baptiste Janssens, ordered the three Jesuit editors to leave the staff of De Nieuwe Linie because he could not agree with the magazine's editorial views. Other journals--Catholic, Protestant and secular--hurried to the defense of De Nieuwe Linie, and a number of Dutch Jesuits have openly protested Father Janssens' blunt handling of the case. Two of the Jesuits have ignored the order, still show up for work at the magazine every day.

Such small signs of defiance have kept Archbishop Beltrami and his predecessor extremely busy writing to their superiors in recent years, and hardly a month goes by that some Dutch theologian does not receive a monitum (warning) from the Holy Office. "We call it a box on the ear," says one.

Translation Errors. Although most bishops in The Netherlands are considerably more conservative than their priests and laymen, they too have been in dutch with Rome. Shortly before the Vatican Council began in 1962, an Italian edition of their encyclical proposing considerations for the council was withdrawn from circulation because of "errors" in the translation; in fact, the Holy Office objected to the Dutch bishops' defense of the now familiar idea of episcopal collegiality--that is, the bishops' sharing ruling power over the church with the Pope. Rome also informed Bernard Cardinal Alfrink of Utrecht that the principal author of the encyclical, the brilliant Dominican speculative theologian Edouard Schillebeeck, would not be acceptable as a theological adviser to the Council's Preparatory Commissions.

Dutch Catholics do not question the right and duty of the Holy Office to keep the faith of the church free of error. Thus most of the censured theologians have accepted their monita, and have either kept silence or corrected what Rome regards as mistakes. But in a land where Catholics (40% of the 51 population) live elbow-to-elbow with Protestants (38%) and the general level of education and intercommunication is high, Rome's fetters often seem petty, anachronistic and Italianate. Pope John's summoning of the council convinced the Dutch that renewal was at hand; and now, says one Dutch theologian, with pride in his voice, "Dutch Catholics have protested openly each time Rome takes an action that they don't like."

*Last week the Vatican's L'Osservatore della Domenica suggested that medical research might call for a re-examination of Catholic teaching on birth control. In an interview for an Italian weekly last week, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office said that public discussions of the pill are up to the Holy See and the Vatican Council rather than individual theologians--but he did not outlaw further consideration of the problem by moralists.

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