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	The New Clericalism III: Scandal in Belgium Aprehendite disciplinam June 26, 2010 http://leorufus.stblogs.com/2010/06/26/the-new-clericalism-iii-scandal-in-belgium/ The news is percolating through the media about the raid conducted by Belgian police in the Diocese of Mechlen-Brussels on the episcopal palace while the monthly Bishops meeting was in session: Belgian authorities on Thursday heightened pressure on the Roman Catholic Church in a sexual abuse scandal, raiding the Belgian church headquarters, the home of a cardinal and the offices of a commission established by the church to handle abuse complaints. Police officers arrived at the church headquarters, the palace of the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, on Thursday morning while the monthly bishops meeting was in progress, a church spokesman said. The police questioned all of those present, from bishops to staff members like cooks and drivers. A raid was also conducted on the home of retired Cardinal Danneels, police confiscated his computer. Not to be criticized for lacking thoroughness, the police drilled holes into the tombs of deceased Cardinal Suenens and his predecessor Jozef-Ernest van Roey to look for any secreted and potentially incriminating documents in their graves using fiber optic cameras. Spokesmen from the Vatican and the Belgian Archdiocese protested these search methods. Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, Belgium’s current archbishop, condemned the raids, calling it the purview of “crime novels” and “The Da Vinci Code.” Really, you can’t make this stuff up. Again the “pedophilia” scandal among Catholic priests rears its ugly head: this search follows in the wake of the resignation in April of Roger Vangeheluwe, Bishop of Bruges, following an admission of child sex abuse. His replacement, Bishop Jozef De Kesel was announced by Vatican sources yesterday. It would appear the Church’s own worst enemies are well placed in the higher echelon of the hierarchy, now involving the Cardinal of Brussels whose resume cites co-authorship of the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Vatican II document which served the impetus for revision of the liturgy resulting in the current state of liturgical affairs. What other publication is on the Cardinal’s resume? Oh yes, the Belgian catechism textbook Roeach: while not an author himself, the Cardinal certainly played a role in its dissemination among Catholic Belgium. Credit for the actual authorship goes naturally to Catholic professors in a Catholic University and a Seminary in Belgium; Prof. Jef Bulckens of the Catholic University of Leuven and Prof. Frans Lefevre of the Seminary of Bruges. This “catechism”, little more than a training manual for young pedophiles-to-be, contains naked drawings of toddlers saying sexually explicit things, the intent of the book being to get children to regard this behavior as “normal”. An article in The Brussels Journal highlights the struggle of the laity against Cardinal Danneels when they protested the use of this perverted book on the minds of their children. The Cardinal, exercising his Bishop’s authority refused to hear the protests of families even attacking one politically involved parent (an MP for the Flemish secessionist party Vlaams Belang) in the press: Meanwhile Danneels’s friends in the press started a campaign against me. “Colen continues to pester the bishops,” was the headline in Gazet van Antwerpen. One evening Toon Osaer, Danneels’s spokesman at the time, phoned me to tell me that as a Catholic I had to “be obedient” to the bishops. In Humo Danneels insinuated that I was “conducting my election campaign.” The article goes on to say: On 5 January 1998 the daily newspaper Het Volk interviewed Patrick Vanhaelemeesch, a catechism teacher in the diocese of Bruges and one of the co-authors of Roeach. He gave some details about the illustration concerning masturbating toddlers in the catechism book. He said that the illustration was intended to convey the message that “toddlers experience sexual lust.” Vanhaelemeesch revealed that the committee of bishops had mentioned this illustration in an evaluation report of the catechism book. The report stated: “The presentation of the sexual-pedagogical attitudes is rendered ridiculous in the eyes of the pupils by the text balloons.” According to Vanhaelemeesch this criticism “indicates that the bishops had no objections at all to the message conveyed [i.e. toddlers experience sexual lust], but feared that the pupils would not take it seriously.” (emphasis mine) Read the article if you can stomach it, but the general impression one gets is that but for the voice of the laity, the clericals would continue to get away with these things – reference again the active lay protests against the Catholic Campaign For Human Development and its funding of pro-abortion and anti-family community organizing groups. But the problem is even deeper: the abuse of power, telling a lay woman to “be obedient to the Bishops” in the face of a scandalous catechism depicting toddlers masturbating, betrays an actual contemptuous attitude among many in the Episcopacy for the laity: The old feudal hierarchical structure that refuses to die after Vatican II continues to exert its muscle on the faithful in the pews. The recent revelations of Cardinal Danneels’ involvement with the disgraced former Bishop of Bruges and his sexual abuse scandal, as well as the scandal surrounding the textbook, Roeach, bring the mind to bear on the authorship of certain of the Vatican II documents. Given the intent of sexual desensitization promoted by the Cardinal of Brussels during his tenure using that textbook, does this perverse sensibility also disguise itself in the paragraphs of Sacrosanctum Concilium? Does the liturgical devastation of the past 40 years in the Church owe much to the mind of Cardinal Daaneels and those whom he has mentored and influenced? We have seen it now in Brussells, in Milwaukee with Archbishop Weakland, in Chicago with Cardinal Bernardin, in Los Angeles with Cardinal Mahony, in Boston with Cardinal Law, the rogues gallery of Episcopal malfeasance and abuse of power grows with each revelation of priestly sex abuse and one begins to see a pattern here, one of infiltration at the highest levels with the intent to undermine established Catholic faith and morals from the Bishop’s Chair itself. This consipracy of infiltration and undermining had in recent past been dismissed as a speculation of disgruntled cranks pining for the old Tridentine Mass, but since Lent 2010 and the exposure of yet more high ranking clerics in the sex abuse scandal, it seems these cranky Catholics were correct in substance if not in form. For the past 50 years a cohort of ordained has moved up the ranks, positioning itself to take the Church into a direction more Antichristic than Catholic and this movement lead by not a few Cardinals has resulted in a schism which as yet the Apostolic See has yet to declare. Perhaps the Holy Father is wise to allow these rogue Bishops to retire and be replaced by orthodox Bishops, but the schism is there and has been there since the papacy of Paul VI, when the windows thrown open to the light by Vatican II instead opened fissures for the entry of the Smoke of Satan. The supposed schism of the SSPX is a diversion from the real schism which has been going unnoticed, but suspected for the past 50 years, were it not for the SSPX, the nucleus from which to rebuild the Church in these times of growing persecution would not exist and persons like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Abbe de Nantes are among the real saints of the 20th century.
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