The two popes of the lowlands

...Hearts: Open Letters to Pope John Paul II, the book contains a compendium of heart-rending pleas by retired bishops, religious provincials, cabinet ministers, journalists, scholars, ordinary mothers, and career women for a better understanding by Rome of Dutch Catholicism...

...Notably, since the retirement of Cardinal Willebrands several years ago, the now conservative Dutch episcopacy remains relatively reticent on most social issues...

...The pope took it all in stride...

...Notably, he side-stepped two eloquent cases for academic freedom in theology at Catholic Universities made by the rectors of Leuven and Louvain-laNeuve...

...Entitled From the Depths of Our john a. coleman...

...On getting on the plane to fly back to Rome, John Paul told Belgium's Catholics, "I did not answer all your questions but rest assured that I will take them back with me to weigh pastorally...

...and Marga Klompe, twice a cabinet minister in Dutch governments...

...He also deftly side-stepped the issue of amnesty for World War II criminals, another point which divides Flemish and Walloons...

...But it generally works well in wider Dutch society as it did in Dutch Catholicism in the 1960s...

...I fervently hope that the divisions and oppositions which have darkened that faith and chilled that love might be overcome in truth and charity...

...And perhaps that was the only thing that could have brought reconciliation a step closer...

...and in all things, charity...

...The only difference is that, in typically Dutch fashion, they voice their platform in undiplomatically blunt terms...

...At almost every stop polite but critical voices raised the same issues which trouble the Dutch moderates...

...In pleading to the sparse congregation in Den Bosch that they accept the wisdom of his choice of the outspoken conservative, Johannes Ter Schure, to succeed the much loved pastoral bishop, Johannes Bluyssen, the pope suggested that the unity he foresees will occur when' 'all bundle together around the bishop and his representative in the local community, the pastor...

...Pax Christi had requested his presence...

...John Paul II must have been carefully coached to avoid pitfalls...

...The Belgium trip had been carefully planned, with small groups in parishes and university settings debating the present Belgian church's pastoral needs...

...She added,' 'We find it hard to believe that the use of contraceptives puts Catholic couples on the margins of the church...

...A VISIT PLAYED IN DIFFERENT TEMPOS The two popes of the lowlands JOHN A. COLEMAN H OHN PAUL n has now completed, with a ten-day visit to the I Benelux nations in May, his pastoral visitations to every M Western European country with a significant Catholic population...

...In Brussels' market square he addressed new immigrants, guest-workers not always welcome in a Belgium of high unemployment...

...What set this tour off from others, however, was that here the format of interspersing papal speeches and homilies with questions or speeches reflecting local pastoral concerns worked well...

...He was not put into the middle of a vigorous Dutch Pax Christi group where this pope,' 'the pilgrim of peace," might have felt at home and found an enthusiastic response...

...Several aspects of the Dutch church become evident through the lens of the papal visit...

...The pope kissed Ms...

...This moderate center has been misleadingly painted in the world press as wild, latitudinarian, "secretly Protestant.'' In fact, their list of particulars for a renewed church looks remarkably the same as that of the moderate center in American or, as events later showed, Flemish Catholicism...

...The pope met representative groups of artists, students, labor leaders...

...This ripe fruit of faith and love must not be allowed to disappear...

...It showed to its more than 10,000 visitors a lively local church of basic scriptural communities, a church concerned for peace and justice, prayer renewal, pastoral outreach, and catechesis...

...A week before the papal visit, the moderates organized a jumbo exposition in the Hague celebrating the church the Dutch bishops would not let the pope see, "The Other Face of the Church...

...Belgium's bishops encouraged their people to frank, if polite, address...

...Massive police presence and security precautions severely complicated access for those who actually may have desired to take to the streets to see the pope...

...Wasser, a moderate, committed Catholic who seeks dialogue and pastoral compassion, and bishops who join themselves to the joys and sorrows — and real questions — of their people...

...In Belgium John Paul U's visit set the local church to honest questions about its future, its evangelical witness, its pastoral plans...

...If the papal crowds are any indication, the conservative Dutch bishops' program of restoration lacks the silent majority of support that is often claimed...

...Those in the know also realize that Dutch criticism often masks a deeper, even passionate, love for the truth of an institution...

...Even the most controversial issues came up, without any aggression or provocation...

...The Belgium trip shows that the pope loses none of his authority when these themes become the focus of a papal trip in a local church where the bishops are truly spokesmen for the faith that lives in their midst...

...The moderate center — which by every sociological indicator over a twenty-year period represents the overwhelming majority of practicing Dutch Catholics — has experienced what seems in its eyes an unbroken series of fifteen years of misunderstanding and sharp rebuffs from Rome and the new conservative bishops...

...The pope is called to fulfill the indispensable Petrine function in the church, strengthening his brothers and — as Belgium left no doubt...

...Earlier this year a remarkable book became an instant bestseller in the Netherlands...

...In the end, John Paul II seemed, in the Netherlands, a more one-sided pope than he actually is, consistently pleasant and courteous but isolated, preoccupied with traditional sexual morality — without the pastoral nuances on this issue he showed in Belgium — and with the dangers of relativism and subjectivism in modern pluralistic Western societies...

...Many of the sites chosen to present the pope must have delighted the Belgian tourist office: the market square in Antwerp and Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Leuven...

...Wasser made clear, in a subsequent interview, that her remarks were aimed more at the Dutch bishops than the pope...

...In Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve he essayed his vision of the role of a Catholic university...

...Unlike the Netherlands where both Amsterdam and Rotterdam (the brain and muscle of the land) were off-limits, in Belgium the pope could venture, with great effect, to the urban and cultural centers...

...No questions to the pope were censored...

...Its key demands envision an authority open to dialogue...

...To any outsider, Dutch critical loyalty and honest discourse sometimes seem a bit blunt and irreverent, leaving as little to the imagination as the tasteless sex shops which dot the land...

...Nor did the organizers give him a platform to highlight the North-South debate, unemployment, or guest-workers...

...It makes up in sincerity what it lacks in subtlety...

...In Mechelen where the pope celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday amidst a joyous cacophony of church bells and a cheering multitude, he proclaimed in Dutch, "Today the pope is totally Flemish...

...Behind the specifics lies a palpable anxiety about the urgency of passing on the faith to the next generation, which has been abandoning the Dutch church in droves...

...Msgr...

...People have seen, to their great wonderment, that here in the old Western world the church is on the move...

...The same preparatory committee demanded an unnecessarily large and visible police cordon for security...

...Many Catholics the world over were pained and saddened to see the empty streets in the Netherlands and the need to abandon the pope-mobile for a closed limousine...

...The unwonted visibility of the Dutch police in such large force drew anarchist elements to Utrecht which led to riots...

...JOHN PAUL n visibly left his heart in Belgium, a country whose people he came to know when, as a graduate student in Rome, he lived at the Belgian College...

...Wasser in the Netherlands, called for a moral pastoral solution for divorced and gay Catholics...

...They did not present him in a Catholic university setting as was done so tellingly on several occasions in Belgium where the former university professor showed a popular and deft touch with students...

...The visit reached back to unifying symbols of past Catholic vitality: the graves of the ecumenical pioneer Cardinal Mercier and the social thinker and organizer Cardinal Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Worker movement...

...The Dutch church is deeply, even bitterly, polarized, reeling in the aftermath of a series of unpopular conservative episcopal appointments...

...The Catholic majority leader of the parliament, Professor Piet Steenkamp, made much the same case in a private audience with the pope where Steenkamp raised the issue of the ordination of women...

...Playfully improvising in French, he told a cheering student audience that perhaps he should replace his papal skull cap for a student's hat once again...

...Shortly before the actual visit, Simonis forebade the earlier proposed intervention of Nijmegen's sixty-fiveyear-old feminist theologian, Tina Halkes, a representative — by American standards — of moderate, if firm, feminism...

...Asked, on the eve of the papal visit, to comment on the Dutch moderates' unrest, Rome's apostolic delegate to the Netherlands, Archbishop Edward Cassidy, remarked, "Some feel that the Holy Father treats them like children in need of discipline rather than as mature Catholics trying to respond to the challenges of Dutch society...

...Featured speakers included the theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx...

...Mrs...

...John Paul II showed his own best pastoral instincts by departing from the approved itinerary to pay a prolonged visit to the ailing Cardinal Alfrink, much criticized by Dutch conservatives for his leadership of the church in the 1960s...

...They feel Pope John Paul II doesn't listen to what they want to say and that the trip is organized so there will be no chance to dialogue with him while he is here...

...The papal visit showed us an enormous readiness of our people to continue living and working enthusiastically within an open Catholicism...

...In his response, the pope said that "In delicate situations [such as divorce] one must never deprive people of hope.'' John Paul abandoned his prepared text to the Belgian bishops to let them celebrate his birthday...

...some constitutional concern to give the local church a voice within the world church...

...By its response and gestures, the Belgian church paraphrased the Bishop of Tournai: "Rejoice in the pope and let the pope be fully pope but, please, don't make the pope more than the pope.'' For in a truly Catholic church there must always be room for many kinds of hats...

...Steenkamp reports that John Paul II's now much-quoted reply was the terse, "There were no women present at the Last Supper...

...He listened intently in Liege as Ann Marie Gilson, a mother and professional woman, told him that while she honors motherhood she also expects from the church some other more nuanced message about the role of women in modern society and the church...

...Disagreements are strongly felt about Commonweal: 372 how to solve the crisis...

...the Argentine Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Alfonso Perez-Esquivel...

...It occasioned a visible public demonstration of the collective weight and importance of Catholicism...

...An outstretched hand is pastorally more inviting than a wagging finger...

...The size and enthusiasm of the Belgian crowds equaled those on other papal visits...

...He delivered an equal number of texts in Dutch and French...

...Commonweal: 374...

...Perhaps only in the Netherlands would a practicing Catholic prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, publicly tell the pope, "Rome seems sometimes so far away from us, and the word Rome — I will not try to hide it — calls forth for many in this country a feeling of reserve, even at times, distrust...

...Both visits told the world as much about the state of local Catholicism in the two nations as about the pontiff...

...Although Dutch Catholics gave the pope high marks for learning their language, John Paul II was somewhat hampered by a language he only partly controls which left him no chance to show that spontaneous warmth in improvising, so winsome in his visits to other countries...

...Nowhere did his gestures or remarks imply support for the Christian Democratic party, a delicate question in a Belgian election year and a topic which divides the Flemish from the French-speaking, who are less likely to organize their social world in Catholic organizational enclaves...

...This represents an especially surprising demand in a country where loyalty to any institution — whether the Dutch monarchy, army, or democracy — would be impossible if it could not be critical...

...Halkes, mother of three children, had been the unanimous choice of Dutch Catholic Women's Organizations to represent mem during the papal Mass in Utrecht...

...a pastoral approach to those who cannot live up to the unbending Catholic sexual morality...

...Musty, auxiliary bishop of Namur, commented, "The commandos of Opus Dei, some coming from outside the country, have followed the pope everywhere...

...Hedwig Wasser who departed from her approved text to ask of the pope that the church show some pastoral sympathy toward divorced and homosexual Catholics...

...Everyone agrees there is a crisis concerning church authority in the Netherlands...

...Antwerp's Bishop Paul van den Berghe picked up on this theme, citing the need to put the numerous papal comments on such a visit into their travel context, not taking them more seriously than the pope intends...

...The pope acknowledged this polarization during the Mass in Utrecht:' 'You Dutch Catholics have built many good things in your own land and elsewhere in the missions...

...Lubbers firmly reminded the pope that in the Netherlands women enjoy full legal equality and that tolerance is a prime Dutch virtue...

...In leper in Flanders Fields he articulated a call for world peace...

...Under circus tents, every religious topic from A to Z was discussed...

...The trip to the Netherlands captured most of the superficial media attention, although the visit to Belgium turned out to exhibit a much more interesting pope and church...

...To the editorial writer for the Flemish Catholic daily, De Standard, the visit showed that "the representatives of 'God's people which asks questions' have courageously and honestly spoken...

...For Catholic sensibilities, the papacy remains an essential depth symbol of Catholic unity and a bridge to the world church...

...The pope's major social message on Dutch soil, delivered in English and on his own terms, consisted in a ringing condemnation of apartheid in his address to the International Court of Justice in the Hague...

...The complaints of the Dutch moderates today focus more on their bishops than on Rome...

...Again: "Don't make the pope more than the pope...

...IN THE END, the most memorable intervention was that of Groningen's Mrs...

...This alternative exposition far outdrew the disappointing papal crowds in the Hague a week later...

...In doing so, the pope advised the bishops to read his text at their leisure and to' 'relativize it'' a bit...

...Every cut deeper into the ordinary Dutch Catholic world reveals a Mrs...

...At the end of his discourse in Louvain-la-Neuve, John Paul was presented with a student beenie...

...The church on its part has seen the dynamism of Catholics who want to contribute to renewal from their own deeper return to the evangelical sources...

...Oruba...

...The pope represents the supreme, but not unique, teaching authority in the church...

...an expanded role for women in the church...

...As it turned out, this request actually backfired...

...Perhaps the pope listened to her discourse especially intently since she, the daughter of a Polish immigrant to the Belgium mining area, finished her comments in Polish...

...Radicals such as the internationally known liturgist Huub Oosterhuis were excluded from the program...

...He kissed the ground in Brussels (neutral bi-lingual territory) to avoid the embarrassment of first kissing Flemish ground at the airport...

...Oruba gently chided the pope for some of his positions regarding the church in Latin America and liberation theology...

...The openness to listen on the part of the pope was total and unfeigned...

...Van den Berghe's remarks seemed necessary because the pope was attended, throughout the visit, by a well organized Opus Dei claque who loudly booed whenever any critical voice was raised, even when the critics were reading texts previously approved by Rome and the bishops...

...his sisters in the ministry...

...Smiling, he went on to suggest that he could not simultaneously wear both hats...

...s. J., author of The Evolution of Dutch Catholicism (University of California), is currently spending a sabbatical year in Leuven, Belgium...

...If, over the years, Rome and the conservative Dutch bishops have shown a legitimate, if perhaps exaggerated, fear of a loss of unity in the essentials of the faith, they have yet to succeed in showing ordinary Dutch Catholics that they believe as strongly in those other two elements in the famous traditional threefold pastoral charge to the church: "In essentials, unity...

...No one expects the mistrust, bitterness, name-calling, and polarization of a decade to disappear overnight...

...in disputed and non-essential questions, freedom...

...A year ago Utrecht's Cardinal Adrian Simonis warned that only' 'loyal'' Catholics would be allowed access to the pope, where "loyalty" seemed rather narrowly 21 June 1985: 371 drawn so as to exclude any critical word...

...AS IN THE Netherlands, the Belgian media star was a woman who departed from an approved text, Monique Oruba, the representative of the students at Louvain-la-Neuve...

...In many ways the Dutch organizers of the papal trip did not give the Netherlands a chance to see the whole pope...

...In Antwerp's newly restored cathedral, beneath priceless Rubens altar paintings, the pope listened carefully as Aurelian Thijs, the president of the inter-diocesan pastoral council, spoke of lay coresponsibility in the church and, echoing Mrs...

...For months, Cardinal Simonis tried to cut off any access of critical voices to the papal entourage...

...We desire bishops who accompany their people on their pilgrims' way instead of sitting over them high on their thrones...

...Those, like myself, who had hoped that this powerful and winning pope might somehow pull off the much-needed reconciliation, may have to accept the judgment of Rex Brico, the Netherland's most respected and objective religious journalist:' 'It was not really his heart that John Paul left here...

...The official Dutch committee for the preparation of the papal visit engaged in much overkill...

...Many of the questions posed to the pope never received a papal answer...

...France's Le Monde noted that the Belgian trip might serve as a model for future papal trips: instead of only speeches by the pope, a true dialogue of local church and supreme pastor...

...awareness of the reality and tensions of being a Catholic "good citizen" in a pluralistic democratic society...

...The sites and themes they set to present John Paul II did not let him speak enough about peace, world justice, or faith and culture, themes he effectively addressed the following week in Belgium...

...Jean Huark, bishop of Tournai, wrote before the visit, "We should not make the pope more than the pope...

...They handled themselves in perfectly boorish ways which reminded me of other regimes of devious memory...

...21 June 1985: 373 No one expects that the papal visit to Belgium will bring sweeping changes...

...There is some merit to the moderates' complaint that the papal trip was organized so ordinary Catholics would have little chance to dialogue...