THE POPE has criticised raids on the Catholic Church by Belgian police investigating sex abuse claims. Pope Benedict described the raids as “surprising and deplorable” yesterday and demanded that the church be allowed a role in investigating abusers within its ranks.
Police last week raided the home of a retired bishop, opened the grave of at least one archbishop and detained Belgium’s nine serving bishops as they met, seizing their mobile phones and only releasing them after nine hours.
In a message to the head of the Belgian bishops conference, Msgr Andre-Joseph Leonard, Pope Benedict condemned the raids and offered his support to the bishops “in this sad moment”.
Msgr Leonard condemned the raid as being inspired by "crime novels and the Da Vinci Code".
The Vatican has also protested to Belgium’s ambassador to the Holy See. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, said yesterday: “There are no precedents for this, not even under communist regimes.”
As cases of abuse by priests have emerged throughout Europe this year, the Belgian church has apologised for failing to root out abusers in the past and has promised to crack down.
On Friday, the pope appointed Msgr Jozef De Kesel as the new bishop of Bruges to replace Roger Vangheluwe (73), who admitted abuse and resigned in April. He was the first European bishop to step down after confessing to abuse.
As part of their investigation into recent claims of abuse, police last week drilled into the tombs of two archbishops at the cathedral of Mechelen, north of Brussels, using cameras to look for hidden documents, a church official said.
Police also took documents and a computer from the home of former archbishop Godfried Danneels, Msgr Leonard’s predecessor, and seized documents from an independent panel investigating about 500 cases of suspected abuse by priests.
After initially treating the abuse revelations emerging in Europe as a plot to discredit the church, Vatican officials have increasingly admitted the need for it to co-operate more closely with the civil authorities.
However in his reaction to the Belgian raids, Pope Benedict stressed that abuse within the church needed to be handled by both civil and canon law, “respecting their reciprocal specificity and autonomy”.
Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops Conference, claimed the inquiry was the sign of a secular government’s “desire to attack the church in its entirety”.