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…

Netherlands’ Foreign Minister Johan Beyen backed by Benelux countries proposed a further integration of European unity but the French and Germans wanted to go slow.

After years of high hope, fine talk and hard work, about all that is left of the great postwar dream of European unity is a diminishing gleam in the eyes of thousands of “good Europeans” and one big tangible fact: the Schuman Coal-Steel Community, which pools the coal and steel…

Because Belgians won’t accept the Dutch paying nonconvertible guilders the Dutch use Marshall Plan dollars to build their railway equipment industry, which works against economic unity.

A struggle to decide the economic shape of Europe is building up. One of the open ing skirmishes was fought last week when eight leading representatives of OEEC (Organization for European Economic Cooperation) met in Paris. The engagement was screened by a fog of long technical words and its result…

The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg are well on the way to economic unity. Ready to adopt a joint customs schedule for all foreign goods shipped into the Lowlands.

While people talked, more earnestly than ever before, about a possible European federation, the Lowlands countries did something about it. The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (an economic unit which would likely rank third after U.S. and Britain as the world’s biggest free-enterprise producer and customer) were well on the way…