Column | ‘Not Pope Night, but King’s Day’

The friend calls more than twenty -four hours after the death of Pope Franciscus; It has just been known that the prince is buried on the day it is King’s Day in the Netherlands. He knows the latter earlier than me, the daily rates of the news are a kind of tidal prayer for him, like a journalist-Monk.

His question: « What would you advise the government now? King’s Day not let it go? Instead, the king goes to Rome, wherever those other heads of state gather for the funeral? »

Because the dilemma is new to me, I fall silent for a moment, and he continues: « You can’t start partying and hosing while the world is mourning in Rome? » The friend, I say it for a moment, is religious, but non-Catholic. The Roman club feeling does not come to him.

A day later we hear what the government has decided; King’s Day starts an hour later, the royal family is present in Doetinchem and Prime Minister Schoof and Minister Veldkamp travel to Rome. Neat polder solution, almost as before. That decision did not surprise me, because I had thought of it that way.

First of all, Willem-Alexander is the head of the Netherlands, that is not his job but his office and therefore his first and most important obligation. It would be very strange if the birthday boy did not appear on his own game, while the people are celebrating his party, at least in name. Moreover, that people, that wants something. Suppose the unlikely case that the king had decided to skip King’s Day once, then people are drilled through a folk festival. You can imagine the anger, a repetition of Beatrix ‘Coronation Day in 1980, where’ no home, no coronation ‘is simply exchanged for’ no Pope Night, but King’s Day ‘.

The Oranje-Nassau family has traditionally been Protestant, I believe it is obliged to their stand. What struck me was that various Protestant denominations, from very heavy to liberal, remained completely protected from antipapism, and fully expressed their condolences to passing the pope. At the same time, that pope remains a delicious target for everything and anyone who can only come up with ‘religion’: ‘nonsense, scam, apekool’ et cetera. I fear that a pretty large mass in the Netherlands will find it very emancipatory and profound to think so scornfully.

The country of ‘functions’, ‘jobs’, even ‘function elsewhere’ wants something that is less wind sensitive

The pope and the king, both servants of their people, although the pope has a lot more souls to serve. The monarchy is a hereditary, and therefore by definition undemocratic institute, which has now risen for more than two centuries as a strange high mountains above the egalitarian, Dutch landscape. Embedded in the constitution, it turns out that the symbol value of the kingship is important. Just when we thought we had taken out ‘all that superfluous junk’, it turned out that on King’s Day, on the free market ‘that junk’ for money could be sold.

In the country of ‘functions’ and ‘jobs’, even ‘function elsewhere’, there is apparently a need for something, which is less wind sensitive.

The new pope is then chosen, but the number of voters is minimal and the procedure perfectly obscure. No democracy that can function this way.

Church prince and prince: outdated buoys in the sea, anchored symbols that are just floating there. But because they don’t just let themselves be carried away by the spirit of the times, it is more and more of value.

Stephan Sanders is an essayist.

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