Juliana & the Healer

"We have no desire to enter the private life of the royal family," announced a leading Hague newspaper primly one day last week. "The Queen's living room at least should be out of the sight and hearing of those who have nothing to do in there," echoed another. Thus gingerly did Dutch newspapers take note of what elsewhere was sensational headline news. A long-standing royal secret was at last out in the open.

Idyl at Soestdijk. To all outward appearances, no ruling house in Europe can boast the solid, sobersided respectability of the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau. For an aggregate of 66 years, its last two Queens have reigned with the placidity of huisvrouwen. The marriage of the present Queen Juliana,who succeeded to the throne at the retirement of her mother Wilhelmina in 1948, to German Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld (a former I.G. Farben representative) was long acclaimed as one of the happiest in Europe. Sentimental Dutch editors were known to refer to their conjugal life at the royal residence as "the idyl at Soestdijk," and even the fact of still another generation without male heirs failed to blight the general Dutch satisfaction in the rulers.

Yet all was not idyllic behind the gleaming white walls of Soestdijk Palace. Prince Bernhard's German birth was a handicap to him among some of his wife's subjects, even though he worked long and hard in England to weld the Dutch resistance forces into an effective unit during World War II. He liked the gay life and fast cars; his Queen was motherly, deeply religious and serious. In 1947 the couple faced a domestic tragedy in the birth of their fourth daughter, Princess Maria Christina (nicknamed Ma-rijke). As a result of German measles suffered by her mother during pregnancy, the little princess was born with cataracts on both eyes. Doctors were able to save some of the vision in one eye, but by the time Marijke was, two, the sight of the other was gone. In desperation, Juliana and her husband were willing to clutch at any straw of hope.

One such straw appeared when Prince Bernhard heard of a wondrous cure performed upon a friend's tuberculous daughter by a woman named Greet Hofmans. Spinster Hofmans (now 61) was a mild-mannered, harsh-voiced woman who was born to poverty and spent a bleak childhood nursing a sick mother. In middle age, after an unrewarding life as a social worker and factory hand, she moved to Holland's hard-bitten north, where piety and superstition often walk hand in hand. There, she said, she had a personal talk with God who offered her miraculous powers for the benefit of her fellow man, if she would renounce all worldly claims. "Of course," Greet Hofmans said, "I accepted." At God's direction, she moved to Hattem, the baronial seat of the Van Heeckeren van Molecatan family. It was there the royal family found her.

Brought to Soestdijk by Bernard and confronted with the half-blind little princess, Greet Hofmans bowed her head in prayer and assured Juliana that the child could be cured. The cure, she said, would be a slow one. To supervise the process, Greet Hofmans herself came to live at the palace, and in time Baron van Heeckeren became the Queen's private secretary.

Two years passed and Marijke's eyes showed no marked improvement, but in the meantime Hofmans' influence over Queen Juliana became more and more noticeable. On a visit to the U.S. Juliana put aside speeches written by her ministers, and launched into speeches of her own, notable for their suggestion of neutralism in world affairs and their aura of vague mysticism. Dutch papers do not lightly criticize the royal family. The Socialist Het Parool, distressed by the Queen's U.S. speeches, veiled its feelings by tactfully assuming that the ministers had written them. Then it asked: Where was any indication that .the Dutch believe in NATO? The speeches sounded like the "views hailed by pacifists, 'third way' people and some mystics . . . Do they hear voices in The Hague and are they haunted by visions? . . . Doubtless these speeches are well-intentioned . . . Nevertheless, we realize with painful embarrassment . . . that all of this might leave the impression that Holland is a queer country."

As for Prince Bernhard, no longer the dashing playboy, he roamed the world serving as a sort of unofficial trade ambassador for his country, and was away more and more from the Queen's side. As Juliana and her mystic grew closer and closer together, there was a clear implication that Greet Hofmans believed Marijke's cure was being delayed because both parents (meaning Bernhard) were not wholly behind Greet Hofmans' intercession with God.

"Practically Speaking . . ." Bernhard once told a reporter that his wife ruled the country, but within the four walls of the palace he was boss. In time Bernhard broke openly with Greet Hofmans and sent her packing out of Soestdijk. She found sanctuary under the protective shadow of ex-Queen Wilhelmina and gradually became the center of a group of religionists whose meetings, under the slogan "Peace through Christ," were held on the ex-Queen's estate.

Juliana invited her wartime friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, to one of these conferences in 1951. After two days of it, Mrs. Roosevelt reportedly went away greatly disturbed by the fanatic impracticability of the discussions. In My Day she wrote: "I felt that it was almost arrogant to expect to establish with the Almighty a direct and conscious connection ... I have not ruled out the possibility of some dangers which are evident . . ."

Betweentimes, at a consulting room in a shabby Amsterdam dancing school, Greet practiced her faith healing. The desperate waited in line. "I help 8,000 people," she claimed, sometimes at the rate of 600 a day. The government at one point investigated to see whether she was practicing medicine without a license, but concluded she was not. Her message was simple: submission to God's will. "A disease is not a thing in itself," she would say. "Thus cancer in a person is connected with the world spiritual disorder of war. Practically speaking, therefore, I cannot cure cancer until war is eliminated."

At Soestdijk, as word of her influence spread, the royal couple's separate secretarial staffs, government ministers and even the royal princesses took sides with one faction or the other. Greet Hofmans' influence on Juliana eventually diminished somewhat. By 1953 the healer was seeing far less of the Queen, but she still lives in a cottage close to the palace, and a difficulty between Juliana and Bernhard has remained.

Truth Must Not Out. On the eve of the Dutch national elections last week, despite Dutch attempts to stop it, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel broke the story, with numerous embellishments. It suggested that the crisis at Soestdijk might lead to Queen Juliana's divorce or abdication. In dismay, the coalition government of Socialist Premier Willem Drees called a conclave of Dutch editors, who agreed not to run the story before the election and to soft-pedal it afterwards. Premier Drees later publicly denied that there was any truth to the talk of abdication or divorce, but by implication admitted the basic truth of the rest of the tragic tale ("Even if something is not a lie, it sometimes should not be published"). In Stockholm, attending the equestrian Olympics, Bernhard would say nothing.

As to Greet Hofmans' views on the matter: "I'm responsible to God and to no one else," she snapped at a reporter last week. "I've never said a word about the royal family, and I never will. Why don't you ask the Queen?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.