Pope Francis’s Belgium intervention sparks backlash

Catholics in Belgium, an ecclesial desert where the practice of Islam is overtaking Christian church attendance, are angry.

Pope Francis’s personal intervention to dissolve a small but flourishing community of priests in Belgium has deep divisions seething below the surface of the Church.

Catholics in Belgium, an ecclesial desert where the practice of Islam is overtaking Christian church attendance, are angry about the pope’s shutting down a top level Vatican court case in which the Priestly Fraternity of the Holy Apostles was fighting for its life.

The group, established by the former Archbishop of Brussels Andre Leonard in 2013, had grown to six priests, with one about to be ordained and 22 more junior seminarians, an impressive achievement in a nation were applicants to train for the priesthood are rare. The community was filling the churches in the two parish it staffed in Brussels, at a time when fewer than 10 per cent of Belgian Catholics attend Mass and less than half the children born to Catholic parents are baptised.

Archbishop Leonard’s successor, Josef De Kesel, launched a ruthless crackdown against the group in late 2015, shortly after his appointment. He said the group was not welcome in the city because “it includes too many French members’’. His stated reason drew incredulity in a nation where much of the church’s work is done by Polish and African priests.

Cardinal De Kesel, a liberal appointed by Francis and quickly elevated to the rank of cardinal, is a protégé of retired Brussels cardinal Godfried Daneels. Cardinal Daneels was a lynchpin of the “St Gallen mafia’’, a group of cardinals opposed to Benedict XVI who met in secret in Switzerland for years and who wanted to Argentinian cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis) to lead the church. In 2015, two retired Belgian politicians confirmed they had brought in Cardinal Daneels in 1990 to sway the conscience of King Baudouin in favour of signing a pro-abortion law.

Last year, as a final recourse, supporters of the Fraternity took their case to the Vatican’s highest tribunal, the Apostolic Signatura, which was scheduled to hear it. But in November, the appellants received a letter telling them that the case was closed. What emerged this week is that the decree dissolving the order was signed by Francis himself. Archbishop Leonard was reportedly intending to join the order.

Vatican critics of the process said that not allowing the case to be heard was “an act of imperium’’ that struck at the rights of those much lower in the church hierarchy. “Francis has no regard for proper process,’’ one angry Rome-based priest told The Australian. “So much for reform of the curia to make it more accountable and open to lay people.’’

The dispute is one the church can ill afford in Belgium, at a time when Muslims, who comprise just 7 per cent of Belgium’s 11 million people, are often attracting bigger and larger crowds at their 300 mosques than churches.

A recent study of religious attitudes among Belgians by the Observatory of Religion and Secularism, based on a small sample of 600 people and published in The Economist concluded that in Brussels, 12 per cent of the population were practising Catholics, 19 per cent were active Muslims, 28 per cent non-practising Catholics, 30 per cent were atheists and agnostics and 4 per cent non-practising Muslims.

“If this trend continues, practitioners of Islam may soon comfortably exceed devout Catholics not just in cosmopolitan Brussels, as is the case already, but across the whole of Belgium’s southern half,’’ The Economist reported.

“The pollsters are struck by the fact many Belgians retain a cultural loyalty to the Catholic faith. albeit a diminishing one. The percentage of avowedly “practising Catholics” far exceeds the numbers who actually turn up at mass, as any cleric will confirm. But one thing is pretty clear. If anything holds Belgium together through its third century of existence, Catholicism will not be the glue.’’

Until recently, Belgium was an overwhelmingly Catholic nation.

The fraternity is the second group targeted by Francis. In 2013, the Franciscans of the Immaculate, a growing international order with about 200 priests and 300 brothers was placed under the direct control of a Vatican commissioner and its members barred from saying the traditional Latin Mass – which Pope Benedict reaffirmed in 2007 was the right of every Catholic priest. In 2015, the Vatican closed the Franciscans’ seminary outside Rome.

The row has erupted as the Vatican edges towards a formal agreement with the Chinese government, despite increasing religious persecutions in China.

The Rome-based AsiaNews agency reported that on Easter Sunday, during Mass underground Catholic churches in the city of Zhengzhou in central China, government officials rushed into churches and insisted that all children, even babies in their mothers’ arms, be taken out of the churches. Prayer and hymn books and bibles were confiscated.

Pope Francis and Argentinian bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, who claims the Church’s social doctrine is being implemented by the Chinese government better than in any other nation, are seeking a rapprochement with the government of Xi Jingping.