The Dutch provincial of the Augustinian order has proposed opening convents to men & women of any Christian faith, married or single. Rome has threatened to disband the Dutch province.

DECEMBER is the darkest month. The sun is lowest in the sky. The nights are longest. Yet in its midst—perhaps in their hunger for warmth and light in the nadir of seasons—believers of the Western world have immemorially celebrated hope. In recent years, God has seemed to many…

During the two-day session, a new order for Europe began to take shape. Admission of new members, most notably Britain, agreed. Juliana invited the delegates for dinner at her palace.

As she raised her champagne glass, Queen Juliana of The Netherlands surveyed the guests seated around her palace dinner table: the President of France, the Chancellor of West Germany and the Premiers of Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and her own country. Said the Queen in a simple toast: “I wish…

Last week Dr. Jan Tinbergen, a longtime leader in econometrics, was finally given the ultimate honor, the first Nobel Prize in Economics.

Economists in recent years have become the most influential of all scholars, taking their place as fixtures in the chancelleries, banks and board rooms of the world. Last week two longtime leaders in this increasingly glamorous science were finally given the ultimate honor, the first Nobel Prize in Economics, the…

Along with other countries, the Netherlands have been forced to impose price freezes. Introduction of the value-added tax, a complex form of sales tax, helped to push inflation.

France, The Netherlands and Denmark have been forced to impose price freezes on nearly every variety of goods and services sold within their borders. All three countries, along with West Germany, Italy, Belgium and Sweden, have recently raised bank interest rates (some of them several times) in an effort to…

Some cloisters renewal started long before the Vatican issued its decree. Most of the 51 cloistered communities in The Netherlands already have TV. One convent packs birth-control pills.

To the secular mind, the vision of monks and nuns living silently and praying ceaselessly behind cloister walls has always seemed, at best, a kind of regrettable eccentricity—harmless enough, but useless too. Yet the Roman Catholic Church, and such Protestant sympathizers as the Monks of Taizé in France, have…

Indonesia annexed West Irian last week. Between intimidation and persuasion, the Indonesians managed to win a unanimous vote in favor of annexation.

Indonesia, once a bastion of noisy self-righteous anticolonialism, last week formally took over a remote, primitive piece of real estate that can hardly be considered anything but a colony. By means of a blatantly rigged referendum, the Indonesians annexed West Irian, the western half of the rugged South Pacific island…

Last week millions of fish died in the river Rhine, victims of the worst case of pollution in the river’s history. Germans failed to sound the alarm sooner. The Dutch were furious.

The Rhine is one of the world’s most scenic and storied waterways. It was a commercial route before Christ, and Julius Caesar first spanned it with a bridge in 55 B.C. Along its picturesque banks, flanked by medieval castles, are Drachenfels, the cliff where Siegfried slew his dragon, and the…

On May Day, as 2,000 Communists gathered in Amsterdam to listen quietly to their leaders, thousands of students battled the police trying to plant Red and V.C. flags on the Nat. Monument.

AS a holiday, both seasonal and pagan, May Day goes back thousands of years. Some remnants of this ancient past still survive: on May Day, French gentlemen give their ladies bouquets of lilies of the valley. In Greece, doors and balconies are decked with floral wreaths. In Czechoslovakia, traditional vows…

Liao Ho-shu, interim chief of Communist China’s mission, persuading Dutch businessmen to invest in China, went to the Dutch police saying he wants to defect to the United States.

It was 4:30 on a cold January morning, no time for a self-respecting resident of The Hague to be on the streets, and the desk sergeant at police headquarters was baffled by the middle-aged Chinese, clad in pajamas and raincoat, who stood before him. From the mixture of broken Dutch…

The methods of people-smugglers, who often succeed in getting their clients to the West, some times get other Westerners into serious difficulties.

Though Communist countries do not ordinarily foster free enterprise, a shadowy group of Western entrepreneurs owes its profits to the existence of the Communist world. It is composed of the people-smugglers, who have made a mechanical — and ruthless — business out of springing refugees from Eastern Europe for a price. The…

The Dutch Pastoral Council that outlines policy for the country’s Catholics, rejected Pope Paul’s encyclical Humanae Vitae as “not convincing on the basis of the argumentation given.”

The church in The Netherlands is perhaps the most independent and autonomy-minded in the Roman Catholic fold. Time and again, it has challenged Rome’s ideas of orthodoxy. Last week the Dutch defied the Vatican again, this time with particular force. Meeting in the North Sea town of Noordwijkerhout, the…

The Common Market’s agricultural chief, Sicco Mansholt, one of the most controversial men on the Continent, called for an immediate attack on Europe’s agricultural surpluses.

Farmers cross pitchforks with their governments almost everywhere, but the dueling is particularly spirited in Europe’s Common Market. In the six member nations, farmers constitute a politically powerful 16% of the population and have extracted uniformly lavish price supports. This has encouraged overproduction and bulging surpluses of eggs, pork, wheat,…