Belgian police have raided the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church and the home of the recently retired Cardinal of Belgium as part of an investigation into the sexual abuse of children by clergy.

On Thursday morning, 30 police officers swooped on the palace of the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, sealing off buildings and removing documents.
The latest blow to the scandal-hit Roman Catholic Church disrupted a meeting of bishops taking place in the presence of the Vatican’s ambassador to Belgium, in Mechelen, just north of Brussels.
A second raid took place at the nearby home of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, 77, where police officers seized a personal computer belonging to the former head of Belgium’s Catholic Church.
A third raid took place in the city of Leuven, where police officers searched the office of the Adriaenssens committee, an independent body set up by the Church to collect and investigate abuse allegations. Over 450 files detailing abuse allegations were confiscated.
Jean-Marc Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels crown prosecutor’s office, said that the raids were “related to the sexual abuse of children within the Church”.
“In a recent dossier the prosecutor was informed of charges denouncing the abuse of minors by a certain number of Church people,” he said.
Hans Geybels, a spokesman for Cardinal Danneels, said that police did not interrogate him during the raid.
“They did take away his computer,” he said. “The cardinal believes justice must run its normal course. He has nothing against that.”
The investigation is thought to centre on April’s resignation of Roger Vangheluwe, Bishop of Bruges. Bishop Vangheluwe stood down after admitting to having sexually abused a young boy during the time when Cardinal Danneels was the head of the Belgian Church.
Belgium’s Church has been hit hard by the sex abuse scandal that has engulfed the wider European Roman Catholic clergy with reports that bishops covered up abuse of in seminars, schools and other church-run institutions.
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Belgian police raid home of archbishop in child sex probe
DW-WORLD.DE
24 June 1010
Police have raided the headquarters of the Belgian Roman Catholic Church in a child sex abuse probe following a raft of accusations denouncing the abuse of minors by a number of church figures.
In Leuven, east of Brussels, police also searched the office of the Church commission which has been tracking complaints and compiling evidence about child sex abuse.
Godfried Danneels headed the Belgian Catholic Church for more than 30 years
Hundreds of complaints “These are searches based on some allegations made to the Brussels prosecutor denouncing sexual abuse of minors by certain people in the Church,” a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, Jean-Marc Meilleur, said.
No names were mentioned, but reportedly there have been some 450 complaints.The raid in Mechelen, where the Brussels archdiocese is located, came while the country’s bishops were meeting there, a Church statement said. In April, Roger Vangheluwe, the bishop of Bruges for the last 25 years, was forced to resign after admitting to sexually abusing a boy earlier in his career. Danneels’ successor, Andre-Joseph Leonard, has vowed “zero tolerance” for cases of child sex abuse since taking over as archbishop in January. In a bid to restore confidence within an increasingly skeptical flock, Belgium’s bishops met in May to publicly beg for forgiveness from victims both for the actions of pedophile priests and the Church’s silence on the issue over the years.Author: Gregg Benzow (dpa/AFP/Reuters)
Editor: Andreas Illmer