THE Vatican has accused Belgian authorities of “violating” cardinals’ tombs during a cathedral raid by police investigating new child abuse claims against Catholic clergy.
The prosecutor’s office admitted that a crypt was searched during a police search of the Mechelen cathedral near Brussels on Thursday.
Estelle Arpigny, a spokeswoman for the office, refused, however, to confirm complaints that the tombs of two cardinals had been tampered with.
“All I can say is that a vault was opened” during the investigation into new pedophilia claims, she said.
Father Eric De Beukelaer, spokesman for the Mechelen-Brussels archbishop, said “the tombs of Cardinals Suenens and Van Roey were drilled and a camera pushed in, apparently to see whether there were any hidden documents” linked to the pedophilia claims concerning Catholic clergy.
hat search was unsuccessful, according to the church spokesman.
The Vatican reacted indignantly to the report.
It voiced “astonishment over how the searches were carried out yesterday by Belgian judicial authorities and its indignation over the violation of the graves of the cardinals Jozef-Ernest Van Roey and Leon-Joseph Suenens.”
The current head of the Catholic church in Belgium, Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, said he was “slightly surprised” at the raids in which the authorities had shown “perhaps excessive zeal”.
“The justice system does its work and it has the right to carry out searches. Nonetheless I find it slightly surprising that it went as far as rummaging around the tombs … and that all the bishops were held until evening.”
Police raided several buildings of the Mechelen-Brussels archdiocese, including the episcopal palace at Mechelen, north of the Belgian capital, as bishops were meeting with a Vatican envoy.
Prosecutors said the raid, involving dozens of officers and investigators, followed a string of accusations “denouncing abuse of minors committed by a certain number of church figures”. The search focused on letters exchanged between alleged victims of paedophile priests and church authorities.
The police confiscated the bishops’ phones for several hours and prevented them from leaving the building during the search. The authorities also seized computer files at the home of Belgium’s top cardinal for the last 20 years, Archbishop Leonard’s predecessor, Godfried Danneels.
The Catholic church in Belgium has endured some of the worst of the worldwide pedophilia scandal besetting the Vatican, having been rocked in April when its longest-serving bishop, 73-year-old Roger Vangheluwe, resigned from his Bruges post after admitting sexually abusing a boy for years.
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