In England, Germany, and especially The Netherlands, a number of speculative theologians are independently reconsidering transubstantiation.

The questioning spirit of aggiornamento begun by Pope John, having opened up discussion on such long-settled issues as clerical celibacy and birth control, is now turning toward another and even more central teaching of the Roman Catholic Church: the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In England, Germany, and…

Ecumenical marriage ceremonies have taken place in the methodically unity-seeking Netherlands.

ECUMENISM

“Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” intoned the Rev. Claudius Miller, an Episcopal minister, at the wedding last month of Susan Ekberg, an Episcopalian, and Patrick C. Barker, a Roman Catholic. The words were from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and the wedding…

Lately, the sources of radical and rebellious Roman Catholic thinking is the staid and sober Netherlands. The latest incident to alarm Rome’s Holy Office involves a lively magazine.

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…

A new European approach to birth control has here and there gone from theory to practice. Sales of the pill in the Catholic south of Holland reportedly rose 40% last year.

Revisions in theology start inconspicuously enough—usually as footnote-laden articles in grey, learned journals with modest circulations. Future church historians may well date a profound change in Roman Catholic thinking on marriage from the current issue of a scholarly Belgian periodical called Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, There, the Rev. Louis Janssens,…

The Netherlands’ Catholic Institute for Social-Ecclesiastical Research has launched a $5,000 prize contest to find new ways to control the fast growing world population.

By 1980, the U.N. estimates, there will be from 34% to 63% more people on earth than in 1950. To some this suggests the need for birth control. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that any mechanical interference with the consequences of sexual intercourse is a mortal sin. But The Netherlands’…