BELGIUM AND ITS PEOPLE

New Zealand Tablet, 10 March 1910, Page 371

BELGIUM AND ITS PEOPLE

RELIGION AND EDUCATION At his accession, the new King Albert of Belgium finds a unified, prosperous country over which to rule. The population of Belgium is 7,160,547. The great majority of the inhabitants, according to the comprehensive article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, are Catholic but the lack of religious statistics makes it difficult to give the exact number of non-Catholics. There are about 30,000 Protestants, 3000 to 4000 Jews, and several thousand persons who, not having been baptised, do not belong to any faith. The kingdom is divided into six dioceses, namely : The archdiocese of Mechlin and the suffragan dioceses of Bruges, Ghent, Liege, Namur, and Tournai. Each diocese has a seminary and one or several preparatory schools for the training of the clergy; there are, in addition, the Belgian College at Rome, a seminary to which all the Belgian bishops send the best of their pupils, and the College of the Saint-Esprit at Louvain, where a superior theological course is pursued. The secular clergy number 6419; the regular clergy, 6237; these latter are distributed in 293 houses. The religious Orders in Belgium have 29,303 members living in 2207 . houses; the members of the Orders, both male and female, devote their time chiefly to teaching and nursing the sick; the male Orders also aid the secular clergy in . parochial work. . Under the guidance of this large body of laborers for the Church the religious life in Belgium is intense, and the works of piety and . charity are very numerous. Statistics of these charities are given in Madame Charles Vloebergh’s Le Belgique Charitable, in the preface to which M. Beernaert states that no country has their equal. Belgium also takes a share out of all proportion to the size of its territory in international works of piety and in foreign missions. It is at the head of the work of the Eucharistic Congress, two of its Bishops, Monsignor Doutreloux, of Liege, and Monsignor Heylen, of Namur, having been the first two presidents of the association. Five sessions of this congress have been held in Belgium : at Liege (1883), Antwerp, Brussels, Namur, and Tournai. Equally distinguished are the services of Belgium in the sphere of Catholic missions. The congregation of secular priests of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, founded at Scheutveld, near Brussels, in 1862, labor for the evangelization of Mongolia and the Congo; several of their numbers have suffered martyrdom, in these countries. The Belgian Jesuits have for their mission-field Calcutta and Western Bengal. • Their missionaries are trained in the Apostolic school established at Turnhout. The Americanseminary at Louvain (1857) aids in recruiting the secular clergy of the United States. Other religious Orders also , labor for the evangelization of foreign regions. The toils

gf“ A.™ . f a ,'V “j of the Belgian missionaries have fe q world-wide-renown; such are Father Charles tains oi th ® ap°stle to the Indians of the Rocky Moontains and rather Damien de Veuster, who devoted himself to the lepers of Molokai. mm The great siiccess of Catholicism in Belgium is largely ai fr£dL tle f freedom it enjoys under th Constitution. ii 0 f « d °“ ° f / pons and their public exercise as n ell as the right to the . expression of opinions on all subjects are guaranteed, with the exception of misdemeanors restriction to Sffrw is liberty ’ (Art. 14). The sole restriction to this liberty is contained in article 16 of the nrpr?r1 tUt +L n ’ W v lh says that a civil marriage must always mav be S® J- ellg A° l l S c °ny, with such exceptions as his^dutv 6 t£ hed by law - • The priest who, in fulfilling his _duty, blesses a marriage in extremis under this article A- I *}, n ?? r xt prosecution and condemnation ; the law ni-nwSf provided for, and which would have protected such cases, , has , never been passed. With the exception of this and the law authorising divorce, to which however, recourse is seldom had, it may be said that the legislation of Belgium conforms to the Catholic standard of morality Although the Church is independent in Belgium, and the country has no State religion, it does not follow that the governmental and the religious authorises have no connection with each other. Tradition and custom nave produced numerous points of contact and relations of courtesy between Church and State. The latter pays the stipends of the Catholic clergy as well as of the clergy of the Protestant and Jewish religions, very moderate salaries which have been slightly increased by a law passed m 1900. The State also assists in the expense of erecting buildings for religious purposes and of keeping them in repair. The parishes have been granted a civil existence and can hold property; each parish has a board of administration, of which the mayor of the town is a member by law, for the aid of the clergy in the management of the finances of the Church. The Liberal Party, it is true has tried a number of times to get control of the Church property, but the law of 1870 (a compromise law), concerning the temporalities of the different religious, only requires the supervision of the public authorities over expenses concerning which the intervention of these authorities is requested. Students at the theological seminaries, who are i?. be parish priests, are exempted from military duty. 1 inaliy, the civil authorities are officially present at the le JJeum which is sung on the national anniversaries* ' and except during the period of 1880-84 the Government has maintained diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The most successful work of the Belgian Church has been done in the field of education, in spite of most violent opposition on the part of the Liberal Party. Article 17 of the Constitution says, concerning instruction : ‘ Teaching 1 r free » ad preventive measures are forbidden ; the repression or offences is reserved to the law. Public instruction given by the State is equally regulated by law.’ The Constitution, therefore, supposes at the same time a free instructi°n and an instruction by the State; it guarantees complete liberty to the first and subordinates the latter to the enactments the law. The Catholics alone have made pse of this article of the Constitution to establish a flourishing series of schools and colleges leading up to a university. The Liberals nave contented themselves with founding a university (subsidised by the city of Brussels and the provinces of Brabant) and an insignificant number of schools, and are generally satisfied with State instruction for their children this instruction they endeavor to make as neutral —that is, as irreligious as possible. They also favor in every way State instruction to the detriment of the free teaching. _ There are two State universities, Ghent and Liege, which have, respectively, 1000 and 2000 students. There are also twenty . State athenaeums with 6000 stu- '' dents, besides 7 communal colleges having abput 1000 pupils; these institutions are for secondary education in its upper classes. The lower classes are taught in 112 intermediate schools, 78 of which are for boys and 34 for girls, with a total of 20,000 pupils. There are also 11 intermediate schools opened by the communes, 5 for boys and 6 for girls, with a total of 4000 pupils.