The Church in Belgium and the Vatican have both issued statements protesting the police raids on various sites in the Archdiocese of Malines-Brussels yesterday, purportedly as part of their investigation into sex-abuse claims. (See story posted yesterday in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread). Inexplicably, among those raided were the tombs of two Archbishops in the Cathedral of Malines (Mechelen). Because of the significance and unprecedented nature of this offense, I am posting the statements on this thread:
Statement by the
Belgian bishops' conference
Translated from
June 25, 2010
The bishops of Belgium were gathered at the Archbishopric of Malines-Brussels this morning, June 24, for their monthly meeting. Around 10:30, court authorities and policemen entered and informed them that they would be conducting a search of the Archdiocese in connection with charges of sexual abuses committed within the territory of the archdiocese.
No other explanation was given, but they confiscated documents and all mobile telephones, while forbidding anyone to leave the building. The search lasted until around 7:30 p.m.
Everyone was interrogated - all the bishops as well as all the personnel. It was not a pleasant experience, but everything took place correctly.
The bishops of Belgium have always said they have confidence in justice and any efforts at justice. The raid was considered in this context, and thus, for now, they will abstain from further comment.
On the other hand, the bishops, together with Professor Peter Adriaensses, president of a pastoral commission to deal with sexual abuse complaints, express regret that during a similar raid, all the files of the commission were confiscated.
This is a violation of the right to privacy of the victims/complainants who chose to present their complaints to the commission. The action is extremely harmful to the necessary work of this commission.
Eric de Beukelaer
Spokesman of the Belgian bishops' conference
Statement from the
Secretariat of State
Translated from
June 25, 2010
In publishing this Declaration, the Secretariat of State reiterates its firm condemnation of every sinful and criminal act of abuse against minors on the part of members of the Church, as well as the need to make reparation and to confront these acts according to the demands of justice and the teachings of the Gospel.
It is in the light of these needs that the Secretariat of State expresses its great concern at the manner in which some raids were carried out yesterday by Belgian authorities, and the fact that these raids also violated the tombs of Cardinals Jozef-Ernest Van Roey and Léon-Joseph Suenens, deceased Archbishops of Malines-Brussels.
In addition to the dismay at these acts, we also regret infractions against confidentiality, to which the very victims, in whose behalf the raids were conducted, are entitled to.
These sentiments were personally conveyed by Mons. Dominique Mamberti, Secretary for Relations with States, to H.E. Charles Ghislain, Ambassador of Belgium to the Holy See.
Secular disrespect for the Church, if not outright contempt, cannot be more graphically illustrated by Belgian authorities than by the action of police raiding the tombs of two cardinals! What did they think - that the Archdiocese would conceal records in those tombs? It is absurd, outrageous and totally unjustified and unjustifiable. It is also very fascistic. I cannnot even recall an analogous raid by Communist police in Eastern Europe during the Communist era!
Almost as outrageous to me is that more than 24 hours since the raids occurred, there has been no reaction so far in the Anglophone press! How difficult is it to translate French and Italian news items which were available almost immediately from yesterday?
If the offended party in this case had not been the Church, I am sure there would be tons of news reports by now denouncing the high-handedness of the Belgian police as an affront to fundamental rights, and the chattering class would have come out in force right away to denounce it.
AFP's English service has this news report today:
Police raid Catholic HQ
for sex-abuse files
BRUSSELS, 25 Jun 2010 (AFP) - Police raided Belgium's Catholic Church headquarters on Thursday and seized computer files at the home of its top cardinal over the last 20 years
amid fresh accusations of child sex abuse by priests.
[The accusations are not fresh at all! Like almost all the accusations reported in the past year from Ireland, Germany and other European countries, the Belgian claims date back to a decade or more.
The latest blow to the scandal-hit Roman Catholic Church came as the Vatican's ambassador to Belgium met with bishops, weeks after Pope Benedict XVI begged forgiveness from victims of paedophile priests.
A spokesperson for Brussels prosecutors said that the action, involving dozens of officers and investigators, followed a string of accusations "denouncing abuse of minors committed by a certain number of Church figures."
Armed police with dogs sealed off the palace of the archbishop of Mechelen, just north of Brussels, "in order to establish if these accusations are backed up or not," said Jean-Marc Meilleur.
A spokesperson for retired Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the man who led Belgium's Catholic Church for two decades until the turn of the year, said police confiscated a computer from the archbishop's home before he was escorted to the archdiocese.
Hundreds of submissions to a special commission set up with the backing of the church in eastern Louvain to examine complaints received of past child abuse were also taken by officers in a related swoop.
Belgian media said these were supposed to have been passed over "discreetly" to justice officials, but child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens, who heads up the commission, railed against the move at a press conference.
He told TV cameras indignantly: "What am I supposed to say to someone who gave me information expecting discretion?"
However,
police, who did not formally interview any officials [That's at variance with the bishops' statement above] returned to the archdiocese with two more trucks early evening to cart off further material for forensics to comb through seeking hard evidence.
The Roman Catholic Church in Belgium has endured some of the worst of the worldwide paedophilia scandal to beset the Vatican, having been rocked in April when its longest-serving bishop, 73-year-old Roger Vangheluwe, resigned from his Bruges post after admitting sexually abusing a boy for years.
According to
retired priest Dik Deville, hundreds of cases of sexual abuse had been signalled to Danneels going back to the 1990s, but Danneels himself recently denied being involved in any cover-up.
[One has to wonder what Deville's game is, especially as he implicates Cardinal Danneels, who was long reputed to be one of the Church's most liberal bishops.]
"I cannot recall such a conversation and it would astonish me if I had paid no attention to such a message or had forgotten it," the former Belgian primate insisted.
A victim of a paedophile priest in French-speaking Wallonia has also accused Danneels'a successor as the leader of Belgium's Catholics, Andre-Joseph Leonard, of covering up an abuser and keeping him for five years at his post. [I don't think this was prominently reported before!]
"We did as much as we could at the time, removing the priest involved from all of the pastoral functions that would have put him in contact with children," Leonard's spokesperson Eric De Beukelaer recently maintained.
In a bid to restore confidence within an increasingly sceptical flock, Belgium's bishops came together in May to publicly beg forgiveness from victims both for the actions of paedophile priests and for the Church's "silence" down the years.
And the usual MSM blather...
Paedophile priest scandals and allegations of high-level cover-ups have surged again since last year across Europe, the United States and Brazil.
Earlier this month, Pope Benedict, who has met with abuse victims in Australia, the United States and Malta, issued his clearest apology yet amid the debilitating flood of complaints.
"We... insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved, while promising to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again," he said.
The Pope himself has faced allegations that, as archbishop of Munich and later as the Vatican's chief morals enforcer, he helped to protect predator priests.
Belgian primate protests
violation of bishops' tombs
Brussels, June 25 (Translated from ASCA-AFP) - The Primate of Belgium, Mons. Andre-Joseph Leonard, has criticized the raids carried out by the police yesterday on various properties of the Archdiocese of Malines-Brussels in connection with investigations of sexual abuse complaints presented against some Belgian priests.
"Justice has a right to make these raids. But what has stunned us is that the police also searched the tombs of two archbishops and that all the Belgian bishops were detained till the evening," Mons. Leonard said.
Center photo shows police standing guard outside the Archbishop's Palace in Malines yesterday. Right photo shows Mons De Kesel (left) with Mons. Leonard.
He spoke of unwarranted 'sequestration' and of 'excessive zeal' in connection with the police raids, at a news conference to present the new Bishop of Bruges, Mons. Jozef De Kesel, who was named by Pope Benedict XVI to succeed Roger Vangheluwe, who resigned two months ago after admitting to sexual misconduct with a young male parishioner.
The police entered the Archbishop's Palace in Malines (Mechelen) north of Brussels yesterday morning during a meeting of the Belgian bishops conference in the presence of the Apostolic Nuncio to Belgium.
The police seized files they believed to contain, among others, letters exchanged between victims and Church authorities. They also confiscated the mobile telephones of the bishops, whom they detained in the residence until they finished goind through the diocesan files and archives almost 10 hours later.
The files included those accumulated under Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who retired last year after 20 years as Primate of Belgium, and who was accused recently of covering up for an offending bishop.
The police apparently used pneumatic drills to open up the tombs of two cardinals buried in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. Rombout (Rumbold) in Mechelen, looking for hidden files, but found none.
[DUH!!!]
![[SM=g8431]](https://im0.freeforumzone.it/up/0/31/3760226.gif)
'Spiegel' telling it
like it is, for a change?
The German news agency
reports a surprising story - to say the least - in the 6/21/10 issue of DER SPIEGEL, which points out that
one of the most important items on the agenda of the 1968 counter-culture movement was 'sexual liberation of children' which shattered previous taboos and went beyond 'boundaries of shame' to create a climate that encouraged pedophilia.
"It has fallen into oblivion, but it was precisely the '68ers and their followers who were gripped by an obsession regarding child sexuality. But now they all seem to have an acute case of forgetfulness".
That is, of course, a self-evident conclusion that people who lived through 1968 and its aftermath, as well as serious students of history, know all too well. It was a climate that led weak-willed, poorly motivated and vocationally unfit priests to indulge their sexual urges, wrongly encouraged as well by the prevailing false interpretation of Vatican II as a blanket pretext to adopt the ways of the secular world.
And it is a fact that has been well established in some of the best US studies to account for the 'boom' in priestly misconduct against minors in the 1960s-1980s.
The article cites 'culprits' such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit - perhaps the most emblematic figure of the 1968 cultural revlution - who urged 'free erotic expression' among children in a book about how to raise children from nursery school onwards; and the Green Movement in Germany, which during their organizational years advocated, among other things, 'joyful' sexual relations between children and adults.
This all makes the sanctimony of the MSM - many of them 68ers themselves or spiritual children of 1968 - all the more sickening. Of course, none of the above excuses the offenses committed by priests, but it explains why the offenses peaked in the first two decades of the Sexual Revolution.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/06/2010 03:24]