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	Cops Raid Catholic Offices in Belgium The Province June 25, 2010 http://www.theprovince.com/news/Cops+raid+Catholic+offices+Belgium/3199133/story.html Police raided Belgium's Roman Catholic church headquarters on Thursday and seized computer files for the past 20 years at the home of its top cardinal amid fresh accusations of child sex abuse by priests. The latest blow to the scandal-hit church came as the Vatican's ambassador to Belgium attended a meeting with bishops, weeks after Pope Benedict begged forgiveness from victims of pedophile priests. A spokesman for Brussels prosecutors said the action, involving about 30 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 spokesman for the man who led Belgium's Catholic church for two decades until the turn of the year, Godfried Danneels, said police confiscated a computer from the archbishop's home before he was escorted to the archdiocese. Some 450 submissions to a special independent commission set up in eastern Louvain to examine complaints received of child abuse in the past were also taken by officers in a related swoop. Belgian media reported that documents held by the commission were supposed to have been passed over "discreetly" to justice officials, but that clearly that had not yet been done as expected. The Catholic church in Belgium has endured some of the worst of the worldwide pedophilia scandal to beset the Vatican, having been rocked in April when its longest-serving bishop, Roger Vangheluwe, 73, resigned from his Bruges post after admitting sexually abusing a boy for years. According to retired priest Dirk 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 coverup. "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," Danneels said. "I never made the slightest attempt to cover up the abuses of Bishop Roger Vangheluwe in a cloak of secrecy," the former Belgian primate insisted.
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