The Pope’s Visit to Netherlands

“Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat” is the phrase that leaps to mind with regard to the story of the papal visit to Utrecht in Holland. What an incredibly sad spectacle of willful children determined to take down their pants in public, thumb their noses and then grin as if they had done something extraordinarily clever!

When I was a schoolboy, the Catholic people of the Netherlands were held up to us as a bastion of the faith on a par with those of Ireland, Poland and Spain. But now we meet Dr. Dr. Henk ten Have, whom your reporter calls “a noted Dutch physician and active Catholic layman,” and Helwig Wasser, “chairwoman of the Diocesan Missionary Council of Gronigen,” who, between them, admonished the Pope in an effort to justify adultery, fornication, unnatural vice, infidelity to one’s vows, abortion and mercy-killing!

If it were all a matter of teenagers romping about, one might conclude that we have in Holland today an unfortunate and regrettable exhibition of freakish behavior by overindulged children who haven’t got enough to do. But Ten Have and Wasser, though they may be freaks, are not teen-agers.

Pope John Paul will be broken-hearted, to be sure, though not for the insult to himself but for the public ridicule heaped on Catholic belief in the Netherlands--and by Catholics.

Aha! Here is a flash. While I write, the telecaster has announced that the prime minister, a Catholic, “explained” it all to the Pope by pointing out that Rome seems so far away from Holland. Somehow, I can’t believe that it is much a matter of distance; rather, I suspect, it is a matter of the drummer to whom they listen, or the piper. Could it be that he is dressed in sheep’s clothing? Or the pied cloak of a harlequin? I wonder, too, how far Hamelin Town is from Utrecht in the Netherlands.

REV. GERARD LaMOUNTAIN

St. Sebastian’s Church

Los Angeles