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,…