Ecology, women, child crime… the highlights of Pope Francis’ visit to Belgium

On Saturday September 28, Pope Francis had a meeting with the students of the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Wallonia), to mark its 600th anniversary. The institution, created in 1425, welcomed around 4,000 students who came to listen to him… and lecture him. The ecological question proved to be more consensual.

In the introduction, the Sovereign Pontiff castigated the “evil which destroys the environment and people”, of which war is the most brutal expression. When religions are used to do this evil, Francis considered it “blasphemy” because “God is Father, not master; he is Son and Brother, not dictator; he is the Spirit of love, not of domination.”

Concerning the links between Christianity and ecology, the author of the encyclical Laudato si’ (2015) first advised being filled with gratitude towards Creation because “the first to take care of it is God”. The Pope considered that the market is the first obstacle to integral and just human development. “We are hosts, not friends,” recalled François, encouraging young people to commit to Creation.

This sentence, also pronounced in front of the students of the prestigious Belgian university center, was not to everyone’s taste. If its long development was applauded in the enclosure, the rector Françoise Smets immediately, after the meeting, denounced the “conservative positions” of the pope, an expression used in a press release signed “UCLouvain”.

The university considered these positions essentialist and reductive. Questioned on the plane which brought him back to Rome on Sunday September 29, he also reaffirmed that “the Church is a woman”, without explaining the reference to Saint Paul (Ephesian 5, 27).

As planned in his agenda, the Pope met with victims of child sex offender priests, seventeen in total.

During the mass celebrated on Sunday in the King Baudouin stadium in Brussels in front of 40,000 people – according to authorities’ estimates – he explicitly asked the bishops: “do not hide the attackers! » “A single case (in the Church) would be enough to be ashamed! » he said before specifying, on the return plane, that the Church is not the only institution affected by the abuses.

Another sensitive societal issue: at UKLeuven (Flanders), rector Luc Sels questioned the Pope on the lack of debate within the Church on gender and the reception of LGBTQ+ people.

Saturday, September 28, the pope deviated from his official program to go and pray at the tomb of the former king of the Belgians (1951-1993) in the royal crypt of the Notre-Dame church in Laeken in the presence of the king Philippe, nephew of the late monarch, and Queen Mathilde.

Francis “saluted the courage” of Baudouin, when he chose, in 1990, to “leave his post as king so as not to sign a homicidal law”, in a reference to his 36-hour abdication in order not to sign legalization of abortion – which was nevertheless ratified.

This new virulent criticism from Pope Francis against abortion has sparked hostile reactions from certain associations or organizations, including confessional ones such as the Christian Mutual.