On the last day of his visit to Belgium, Sunday, September 29, Pope Francis diverted attention from sexual violence within the Catholic Church by triggering a controversy over another very sensitive issue, that of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy (abortion). ). He announced, during a mass celebrated before some 40,000 people at the King Baudouin stadium in Brussels – the former Heysel stadium – that he would begin, upon his return to Rome, the process of beatification of the former king, who died in 1993. . “I call on the bishops of Belgium to help in this cause”declared.
The day before, praying at Baudouin’s tomb, Francis had greeted “courage” of a man who, he added, had “He chose to leave office to avoid signing a deadly law”. A few hours later, on the plane that took him back to Rome, the Pope declared to journalists: “An abortion is a homicide, the doctors who do this are, if you allow the expression, hitmen. »
In March 1990, King Baudouin’s refusal to sign the law decriminalizing abortion, which parliamentarians had just approved, opened a crisis in the upper echelons of the State. The Basic Law of the country establishes that “the king sanctions and promulgates the laws”But, by believing that the text contravened his Catholic faith, the monarch had unleashed a serious institutional problem.
The then prime minister, the Flemish Christian Democrat Wilfried Martens, had to use his imagination and resort to another article of the Constitution that evokes a possible impossibility of governing in the name of the king. This provision, inspired by the English example and the dementia of King George III in 1810, provides that in the event of the sovereign’s mental incapacity to perform his duties, the government resumes all its powers. Which was done. Although Baldwin had obviously retained all his lucidity, the government itself signed the law and allowed the monarch to resume his duties… thirty-six hours later.
“A provocation”
The episode raised eyebrows, especially since the country had been debating for nine years the correct way to reconcile law and reality: in several judicial districts, abortions were performed in plain sight without any penalty being imposed. Obviously influenced by his very pious Spanish wife, Fabiola de Mora y Aragón, Baldwin even threatened, at that time, to renounce the throne. He had previously consulted Pope John Paul II, who, however, did not give him any advice.
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