Full Speech of Pope Francis to the Authorities of Belgium

Below is the full speech that Pope Francis gave this morning to the Belgian authorities, after his private meeting with the country’s King and Queen:

I thank Your Majesty for the warm welcome and the kind greeting he has given me. I am very pleased to be visiting Belgium. When one thinks of this country, one thinks of something both small and large, a Western country and at the same time a central one, as if it were the beating heart of a giant system.

Indeed, the proportions and the order of the greatnesses are deceptive. Belgium is not a very large state, but its peculiar history has meant that, immediately after the end of the Second World War, the tired and weakened European peoples, embarking on a serious path of pacification, collaboration and integration, saw Belgium as the natural seat of the main European institutions. Because it is the dividing line between the Germanic and Latin worlds, bordering France and Germany, countries that had most embodied the nationalist antitheses at the root of the conflict, Belgium appears as the ideal place, almost a synthesis of Europe, from which to contribute to the physical, moral and spiritual reconstruction.

Belgium is a bridge between the continent and the British Isles, the Germanic and Francophone areas, and the south and north of Europe. A bridge to allow harmony to spread and controversies to be dispelled. A bridge where everyone, with their own language, mentality and convictions, meets the other and chooses the word, dialogue and exchange as the means of relating. A place where one learns to make one’s own identity not an idol or a barrier, but a welcoming space that is a point of departure and return, where valid exchanges are promoted, new balances are sought together and new syntheses are built. Belgium is a bridge that supports trade, that communicates and puts civilizations in dialogue. A bridge, therefore, is indispensable for building peace and repudiating war.

This is how we understand how big little Belgium is. We understand Europe’s need for it to remind itself of its history, made up of peoples and cultures, cathedrals and universities, conquests of human ingenuity, but also of many wars and a desire for domination that sometimes turned into colonialism and exploitation.

Europe needs Belgium to carry forward the path of peace and fraternity between the peoples that make it up. This country reminds all the others that when, on the basis of the most varied and unsustainable excuses, borders and treaties are disregarded and the right to create law is left to the weapons, subverting the existing law, Pandora’s box is opened and all the winds begin to blow violently, beating against the house and threatening to destroy it. At this historical moment, I believe that Belgium has a very important role to play. We are close to an almost world war.

Indeed, harmony and peace are not a conquest that is achieved once and for all, but a task and a mission that must be cultivated incessantly, treated with tenacity and patience. In fact, when human beings stop remembering the past, depriving themselves of its lessons, they have the disconcerting capacity to fall again, even after having risen, forgetting the suffering and the terrifying cost of past generations. In this, memory does not work. It is curious. It is other forces in society or in people that make us always fall into the same things.

In this sense, Belgium is more valuable than ever for the memory of the European continent. Memory that provides irrefutable arguments for the development of constant and timely cultural, social and political action, both courageous and prudent, and that excludes a future in which the idea and practice of war, with its catastrophic consequences, becomes a viable option again.

History, as we know, magistra vitae , teacher of life, too often ignored, calls from Belgium to Europe to resume its path, to recover its true face, to trust again in the future by opening itself to life, to hope, to overcome the demographic winter and the hell of war. These are two calamities at this moment. The hell of war, we are seeing it, which can turn into a world war. And the demographic winter. With this we must be practical. Make children, make children!

The Catholic Church wishes to be a presence which, bearing witness to its faith in the risen Christ, offers to individuals, families, societies and nations an ancient and ever new hope, a presence which helps everyone to face challenges and trials, without volatile enthusiasm or gloomy pessimism, but with the certainty that the human being, loved by God, has an eternal vocation to peace and goodness, and is not destined to dissolution or nothingness.

With her gaze fixed on Jesus, the Church always recognizes herself as a disciple who, with fear and trembling, follows her Master, recognizing herself as holy in that she was founded by Him and, at the same time, fragile, holy and sinful and insufficient in her members, always lacking and overwhelmed by the task entrusted to her.

The Church announces News that can fill hearts with joy and, with works of charity and countless testimonies of love for one’s neighbor, seeks to provide concrete signs and proof of the love that moves her.

She, however, lives in the concreteness of the cultures and mentalities of a given age, which she helps to shape or which, in some way, sometimes subjugates her; and she does not always understand and live the Gospel message in its purity and fullness. The Church is sinful, she is holy and sinful.

The Church lives in this permanent coexistence of holiness and sin, of light and shadow, often with the result of great generosity and splendid dedication, and sometimes, unfortunately, with the emergence of painful counter-witnesses. I think of the dramatic cases of child abuse, to which the Prime Minister and the King have referred, a scourge that the Church is facing with decision and firmness, listening to and accompanying the wounded and implementing a broad prevention programme throughout the world. Brothers and sisters, this is the shame, the shame that today, all of us must take control of, ask for forgiveness and solve the problem.

The shame of child abuse. We think of the time of the Holy Innocents and say, “Oh, what a tragedy! What did King Herod do!” But today, in the Church itself, this crime is taking place. The Church must be ashamed, ask for forgiveness and try to resolve this situation with Christian humility. And do everything possible to ensure that this does not happen again. Someone tells me, “But Your Holiness, think that according to statistics, the vast majority of abuses occur in families or in the neighborhood or in the world of sports and at school.” If there is just one, that is enough to be ashamed of. In the Church we must ask for forgiveness for this, and others must ask for forgiveness on their part. This is our shame and our humiliation.

In this regard, I was saddened by the phenomenon of “ forced adoptions ”, which also occurred here in Belgium between the 1950s and 1970s. These thorny stories mixed the bitter fruit of a crime and a misdemeanour with what was unfortunately the result of a mentality that was widespread in all strata of society, to the point that those who acted according to this mentality thought in good conscience that they were doing good for both the child and the mother.

Often families and other social entities, including the Church, thought that, to remove the negative stigma that unfortunately affected single mothers in those times, it would be better for both mother and child if the latter were adopted. There were even cases in which some women were not allowed to decide whether to keep the child or give it up for adoption. And this happens today in some cultures, in some countries.

As the successor of the Apostle Peter, I pray to the Lord that the Church may always find within herself the strength to act with clarity and not conform to the dominant culture, even when that culture uses and manipulates values ​​derived from the Gospel, but only to draw illegitimate conclusions from them, with their consequent burdens of suffering and exclusion.

I pray that those in charge of nations, looking at Belgium and its history, will learn from this and thus spare their people from endless catastrophes and countless mournings. I pray that those in power will know how to assume their responsibility, the risk and the honour of peace, and will know how to avert the danger, the ignominy and the absurdity of war. I pray that they will fear the judgement of conscience, of history and of God, and will change their gaze and their hearts, always putting the common good first. At a time when the economy has developed so much, I would like to emphasise that in some countries the investments that yield the most profit are the arms factories.

Your Majesty, ladies and gentlemen, the motto of my visit to your country is “ En route, avec Esperance ”. The fact that Esperance is written with a capital letter makes me think, it suggests to me that hope is not something that one carries in one’s backpack on the road, no, hope is a gift from God that never disappoints and is carried in one’s heart. And so I would like to leave you with this wish of hope, for you and for all the men and women who live in Belgium: that you may always ask for and receive this gift of the Holy Spirit, to walk together with Hope on the path of life and history.

Daily Reading, Saints

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