On the last day of his visit to Belgium, Pope Francis hosted a large mass at the King Baudouin stadium in Brussels. Acclaimed upon his entry by some 40,000 faithful, he decided to devote a large part of his homily to sexual abusecalling on bishops not to “cover up” sexual violence within the Church.
He also gave them asked “to condemn the aggressors and help them to heal from this disease”. “Evil cannot be hidden, evil must be revealed in broad daylight, let it be known. Let the aggressor be judged, whether he is a layman or a bishop,” he added, to applause .
Pope Francis was also questioned about welcoming LGBT+ people and the place of women in the Church, all themes which highlighted the strong expectations of Belgian Catholics in the face of a doctrine considered by some to be too outdated. However, his response caused disappointment and incomprehension within the French-speaking Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL), which criticized, in a press release, “a reductive position”.
Because the sovereign pontiff notably placed masculinism and feminism on the same level. “One thing is masculinism, which is wrong. Another is feminism, which is wrong”he said. An outing that he said he regretted the next day. “This press release was prefabricated. It was made while I was speaking, and that is not moral,” he said during a press conference aboard the plane taking him back to Rome.
Pope condemns Israel’s ‘immoral’ use of force
During this stay in Belgium, Pope Francis also expressed his “pain” and “concern” at the widening and intensification of the conflict in the Middle Eastand demanded an immediate ceasefire in “martyrized” Lebanon, as well as in Gaza. “This war is having devastating effects on the population,” he continued. “Too many people continue to die day after day in the Middle East.”
He then condemned Israel and the “immoral” use of force used by the Jewish state. “A country which, with force, acts thus, whatever country may be, which acts in such a superlative manner, [se prête à] immoral actions,” he said.
According to him, “defense must always be proportional to attack”. “When this is not the case, a dominating tendency appears that goes beyond morality. Even in war, there is a morality to be defended. War is immoral, but the rules of war indicate a form of morality,” he said.
The Israeli army carried out dozens of new raids against Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon on Sunday, two days after killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah. Near‘a million people may have been displaced by Israeli strikes on Lebanonthe largest population displacement in the country’s history, according to Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati.
He claimed be on the phone “every day” with the parish of Gaza and be informed of the “cruelties happening there”. The Hamas government’s Health Ministry announced on Sunday a new death toll of 41,595 in the Palestinian territory for almost a year, adding that 96,251 people had been injured.
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