Belgium: The Vice Prime Minister Lashes Out at Archbishop Léonard

Source: FSSPX News

Laurette Onkelinx.

According to the Socialist Belgian Vice Prime Minister, “the Catholics of Belgium deserve better” than Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, archbishop of Malines-Brussels.  In an interview broadcasted on RTL-TVI on January 8, Laurette Onkelinx openly claimed: “the believers of our country deserve to have another representative,” adding that she scarcely appreciated the prelate’s public comments, which she called “a provocation against democracy.”

In his latest work, Agir en chrétien dans sa vie et dans le monde (ed. Fidélité) (Acting as a Christian in One’s Life and in the World), presented on January 5, in Malines, Archbishop Léonard deplores “the many abuses committed today in matters of parliamentary democracy.”  According to him, “Parliament takes upon itself the right to decide by majority vote on the meaning of sexuality, on the difference between masculine and feminine, on the meaning of the word ‘marriage’, on the metaphysical relation between the human being and finiteness and death, on the quality of embryos deserving to be respected or not.”

In the Archbishop of Malines-Brussels’ eyes, a remedy to these abuses would be for men and women with strong Christian convictions to get involved in politics: “Without a sense of transcendence, the danger of an arrogant democracy, that thinks that a vote is enough to found a right, lies in wait for us.”

(sources: apic/belga – DICI#249, Feb 3, 2012)