‘A clean, well-lighted place’—the phrase occurs readily enough to anyone visiting Holland today and it has its own modulation when thought of in connection with contemporary Dutch Catholicism. Here, if anywhere, we can see translated into coherent and consistent practice much of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and it is hardly necessary to say that the notion of a Church as a whole seriously attempting to embody that spirit and not just paying lip- service to it cannot be other than impressive. A visit to Holland provides an opportunity to see some of the ‘progressive’ theological thinking in the Church ‘in action’, as it were—thinking which made us conscious certainly of ‘the well-lighted place’, but also, and more unexpectedly, of the shadows which fell across it.

Two propositions central to modern theological thinking are the importance of establishing a view of faith as a personal commitment and recognition of the pluriform cultures in which we live. And so it is not surprising to find these assumptions shaping contemporary Dutch Catholicism.

With regard to the first, in almost every conversation we had, words like ‘authenticity’, ‘maturity’, and ‘personal commitment’ occurred with unfailing regularity. Celibacy, to take the most obvious and topical issue, was felt to be significant only if it was a freely-chosen, maturely-pondered vocation. The individual had to accept it as the only mode of life in which his personal and social fulfilment could be envisaged. Celibacy as an obligatory pre-requisite for the priesthood or, at the least, intimately bound up with its meaning and function, was seen as a legalistic intrusion into the private conscience of the person concerned.