HALLE, Belgium (AP) — The congregation at the Don Bosco church solemnly took the holy host after it was blessed during a Sunday service by Nancy Speeckaert — a woman. Only a week earlier, to equal excitement, she had also blessed a wedding. On both occasions, the humble neighborhood church was filled to near capacity with generations of joyous faithful.
And if a key tenet of Catholic doctrine was breached by a woman celebrating the sacrament, it was all covered by a coat of religious love. Two miles southwest, in the center of the same town of 44,000 near Brussels, less than half of Halle's big Saint Martin's Basilica was filled for Sunday's main Mass, where within minutes of the liturgy starting, words about guilt and calls of “go away, Satan” echoed among the stone pillars. Pope Francis will be visiting Belgium from Thursday to Sunday, facing a flock ravaged by countless scandals of priest sexual abuse and dwindling in the face of modernity, where women and gay people insist on an equal role and rights.
For years now, progressive Don Bosco had increasingly sought its own way and in March, the Flemish Brabant Mechelen vicarship said it could no longer function as a Catholic parish “partly because of the different views on the celebration of the sacraments.” The Catholic leadership, however, allowed the Don Bosco community to continue its activities in the church as it prepares to become “an independent religious community." “They were coloring outside the lin.
