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	By-the-book Policing -- the Book Being by Dan Brown By Patrick McIlheran Milwaukee Journal Sentinel June 30, 2010 http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/97503779.html Interesting, the blowback that Belgian authorities are now getting after last week’s raid of a Catholic Church panel investigating clergy sexual abuse: The victims, it turns out, are ticked. Belgian cops raided the panel’s offices at an archdiocese’s headquarters, in the process locking up bishops meeting elsewhere in the building and confiscating their cell phones for a few hours. Police drilled holes into some bishops’ tombs to stick cameras in. Cops also made off with all the panel’s papers, shutting down its work. And letting out its secrets, as the Associated Press reports: One of the victims of long-ago sexual abuse has filed a complaint over prosecutors’ seizure of the records. “Jan Hertogen, a 63-year-old sociologist, said he told his story to the panel on the condition it would not be passed to authorities. He said the police raids — which also targeted a Catholic cathedral, church offices and a crypt — were an invasion of his privacy. “ ‘After all those years, I told my story to the (sex-abuse panel) insisting it not be shared,’ he said, adding that he was now willing to speak to the media because he was so distressed at the victims’ loss of privacy.” Not that police oughtn’t investigate crimes (they should, vigorously), but this does seem to be an unforeseen consequence – or, at any rate, a departure from the narrative about churchmen still being secretive at the expense of victims. Now, it's at their request, apparently. Officially speaking, the Church says it’s outraged over the raids, which vindicates the police in many minds. Still, some of what authorities did was amusing in its force. Italian journalist and author Vittorio Messori, quoted in the National Catholic Register, wondered, for instance, what the cell phone seizure was about: “To prevent what?” he asked. “To stop the bishops calling for a blitz from the paratrooper section of the Vatican Swiss Guard to free them?” “But he said the Belgian judiciary have set themselves up for the most ‘devastating ridicule’ over the decision to search at least one cardinal’s grave in the Mechelen cathedral — a move emulating the plot of a Dan Brown novel. They show themselves to be ‘obsessed with riddles, mysteries, secret codes: always and only Catholic, of course,’ Messori wrote. ‘The inquisitors, obviously already believing in them, have fallen for the joke of a prankster: “Go to the old cathedral, go down to the dark crypt, open the venerated tombs of the cardinals: There you will find the scrolls which show the plot of the current priests, followers of paedophile cults, as were their predecessors, the Templars …”’”
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