After his Asian tour, Pope Francis arrives in Luxembourg this Thursday, September 26, before heading to Belgium for three days where his schedule promises to be busy.
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After showing astonishing resistance during the twelve days of his recent trip to AsiaPope Francis, 87, is this time opting for a less distant trip. He will begin his 46th trip abroad with an eight-hour visit to Luxembourg, where he is expected this Thursday mid-morning. He is to meet the Grand Duke, the authorities and the diplomatic corps as well as the Catholic community at Notre-Dame Cathedral.
He will then return to Brussels on Thursday evening for a three-day apostolic visit, marked by the 600th anniversary of the Catholic University of Louvain, during which he will be received by King Philippe at the Château de Laeken, and will meet the Prime Minister, the authorities and the clergy at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. In the kingdom, the visit of the Holy Father is a real event. And for good reason: the last papal visit to the kingdom was in 1995 when John Paul II came for the beatification of Father Damien, a 19th-century missionary who has since been canonized. But we have to go back to 1985 for a real “apostolic visit”, the equivalent of an official trip.
THE Pope Francis will hold two meetings at the Catholic universities of Louvain in Flanders (KU Leuven) and Louvain-la-Neuve in Wallonia (UCL): the first on Friday, with an academic tone, with professors and researchers, and another on Saturday in the more informal form of an exchange with French-speaking students. This is where topics such as welcoming refugees, solidarity, social inequalities and the climate will be discussed. These are topics with which Pope Francis is most in tune with a Belgian society considered progressive and increasingly less Christian. Fifty-eight percent of Belgians identify as Catholic, but the churches are not very full.
Meeting with victims of sexual abuse
Sunday’s high mass at the King Baudouin stadium on the Heysel plateau will bring together 39,000 sold-out faithful, all the seats have already been reserved. A figure, however, much lower than the 100,000 faithful present at the mass celebrated by John Paul II in 1985. It must be said that in addition to the vocations crisis, the Church of Belgium has since been shaken by several scandals, particularly sexual abuse.
During his stay, the Pope is to meet privately with 15 victims of sexual assault within the Church. This meeting “in complete discretion”, the place and date of which have not been specified, is organized by the country’s bishops’ conference, where the case had resurfaced in the fall of 2023 with the broadcast of a shocking documentaryVictims testified, revealing a secret sometimes buried for decades, many deploring an omerta in the Church to protect the aggressors and the fact of never having been able to obtain justice.
Victims, in an open letter published by the newspaper The eveninghave demanded a strong word from Francis on this subject on the occasion of his visit. The Pope, who promised a ” zero tolerance “, could also evoke the scandal of “forced adoptions”children taken from their mothers in the last century with the complicity of nuns with a view to adoption. The Belgian daily HLN It is estimated that up to 30,000 children were taken from their mothers in Belgium between 1945 and the 1980s, a figure that the Catholic Church is unable to confirm.