Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium, was pelted four times with custard pies at a press conference by homosexual activists.
The AFP is reporting that Archbishop Leonard was attacked while speaking at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve near Brussels on Tuesday. Several gay activists in the crowd rushed forward with pies, hitting him in the face. A total of four pies were thrown during the melee.
One of the individuals who threw a pie later told Belgian media that it was “for all those homosexuals who daren’t tell their parents they are gay, for all those young girls who want to have an abortion, he absolutely deserved it.”
The latest attack on the Archbishop, who has been the target of similar attacks in the past, was apparently over comments he made recently about gay people in which he compared homosexuality with an eating disorder. The Archbishop is quoted as having said: “Homosexuality is not the same as normal sex in the same way that anorexia is not a normal appetite.”
While the video of the attack is being shown on-line by homosexual activists, there has been plenty of support for Archbishop Leonard whose official Facebook page has been loaded with sympathy and encouragement from friends.
The attack comes only a week after Cardinal Theodore McCarrick addressed a Senate Judiciary Committee in which he pointed to precisely this kind of intolerance toward the Church in secular societies which occur merely for professing the Faith.
“Acts of bias and discrimination towards Catholics and our beliefs are often expressed very publicly,” Cardinal McCarrick noted. “For example, we are charged with discrimination or called ‘bigots’ when we advocate for the traditional understanding of marriage between one man and one woman, which many religious and non religious traditions have supported throughout human history. . . .
“We advocate for an authentic vision of marriage not to offend or to treat people unjustly, but to offer a positive and healthy model of the human family, which has served as the foundation of society throughout the ages.”
McCarrick correctly pointed out that most of the hostility toward Catholics is not coming from people of other faiths, but from the radical secularism that is being allowed to run rampant through our society.
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