@foraloysius
It must have placed the parents in a difficult position. Normally, parents are present at a child's wedding, unless the person has become a Mormon and nonmembers are not allowed inside Mormon temples.
We also tend to forget that until Franco's death, Spain was sort of a "pariah nation". I remember visiting Barcelona using a Eurail Youth Pass in 1975. While riding the rails all over Europe, you'd meet other young people in your train compartment all doing the same thing, and of course one would discuss where one had been. When I mentioned Barcelona, sometimes that would be met with disdain, as if it was politically unfashionable to visit Spain (1975), as if I was somehow abetting or aiding Franco by virtue of my visit. Yes, of course, people from Holland were taking winter vacations to Spain by then, but university-aged backpackers were often harrassed at the Spanish border due to their long-haired appearance (or lack of tourist dollars to spend). Some young people stayed away from Spain because of the stories/rumors of the border police.
Even without the religious subterfuge, I would imagine the government wanted nothing to do with a possible future Spanish monarch, both due to old history and recent (Franco) history. Another issue for her in the early 1960s is that the other sisters were still unmarried and had not produced any heirs, and by conversion she would (by tradition, if not by actual constitutional law*) lose her place in the royal succession. With Christina's disabilities, basically that left only two successors, Beatrix and Margriet, and this situation continued until the late 1960s when Beatrix and Margriet married and bore children.
The photo below was taken in San Francisco in 1982 when Beatrix and Claus visited California (yes, they visited Disneyland....). The woman with the dark hair is then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who today is a US Senator from California. She was deputy mayor when Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated, and she became Acting Mayor at that point in time. Feinstein ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1990, but won an election for US Senator in 1992. Because of the conspicuous hat, there is NO QUESTION which one is Beatrix. In fact, if she appears hatless in public, I always wonder if it is an imposter.
Way more than her mother, she is into hats.
*her older sister--Koningin Beatrix--is after all an attorney who passed her law exams and who is, technically speaking, permitted to practice law in Holland.
