Netherlands

Dutch cardinal: Bishops warned of euthanasia’s slippery slope
- Catholic News Service, Global Church
- August 2, 2017
The Netherlands became the world’s first country to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2002 and has since witnessed a rapid increase in related deaths, with 20 now occurring daily, according to a May report by the Regional Euthanasia Commission. A new assisted suicide bill, introduced in 2016, would allow healthy people suffering nonmedical conditions such as “loneliness, bereavement, limited mobility and decline from old age” to be helped to die by a nonprofessional “assistant-in-suicide.”
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Pope Francis meets King and Queen of the Netherlands, returns long-lost stick
- Catholic News Agency, Vatican
- June 22, 2017
Meeting the king and queen of the Netherlands, Pope Francis returned a long-lost royal stick of William I, Prince of Orange, which until recently had remained lost in the Jesuit Catalan archives. According to a press release, the gesture is “a testimony of reconciliation, and of the current union between the two countries and religions.”
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Dutch Church relieved after elections, Dutch Catholics not so much
- Catholic News Service, Global Church
- March 18, 2017
The Catholic Church in the Netherlands are satisfied their pre-election appeal to not “indulge in anger and intolerance” was “received positively and clearly appealed to Catholics.” Populist Geert Wilders was defeated at the polls, although his party will have the second largest contingent in the parliament.
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Dutch cardinal floats idea of encyclical on gender theory
- Catholic News Service, Global Church
- November 7, 2016
Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht in the Netherlands has said a papal encyclical or other magisterial document “might appear to be necessary” to counter the spread of the new theory that gender can be determined by personal choice rather than by biology.
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