Beatification or Sanctification for King Baudouin?


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crisiñaki

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Will there be a beautificatio of king Baudouin?

I read about it in several blogs but I'm aware those aren't the most reliable of sources, have anyone heard about it?

I would like to know the truth about those statements;)
 
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I always admired King Baudouin as a real Catholic Monarch. He was always very attached to his belief and principles...But I don't know if we could speak about a canonization...I don't know much about his private life to state my opinion on this.

I wish that someone who has studied his life more thoroughly could said something interesting in this thread.

Vanesa.
 
crisiñaki said:
I read about it in several blogs but I'm aware those aren't the most reliable of sources, have anyone heard about it?

I would like to know the truth about those statements;)

The answer is no.Allthough the late King was an admirable man and devout catholic,there are no plans for beatification.Maybe some overzealous person sugested it,but it's not in the making.
:)
 
Thank you for your answer Lucien!:flowers:
I thought to ask here 'cuz if I were to find the answer it would be here:D
 
The answer is no.Allthough the late King was an admirable man and devout catholic,there are no plans for beatification.Maybe some overzealous person sugested it,but it's not in the making.
We can't actually give a straight yes or no answer. The case for Sainthood may well have been put forward to the Vatican but hasn't been made public. Officially the case hasn't been opened for canonisation but it's entirely possible that some preliminary hearing has taken place, whilst it's also possible that it hasn't even been considered. John Paul II was quite good friends with His late Majesty and Queen Fabiola so there may have been some request to instigate sainthood on his part. If not, we just wait for a Belgian Pope!
 
HLN has an article on king Baudouins sanctification. the general mesage: it won't happen any time soon. At the moment the process is still in the research stage, it can all take 50 to 100 years to accomplish.

Article in Dutch here.
 
Since I am not a Roman Catholic, I have no idea what it takes to sanctify someone. I was under the impression a miracle had to occur for that person to be considered.
Can someone explain the process?
 
In the most basic terms, in order for someone to be canonized, they must have a miracle accredited to them.
 
Thank you POC and Empress. Quite interesting. Wonder how this develops.
 
I'd be willing to bet that it won't. Fewer and fewer people are sanctified/beatified/canonized by the Church these days. Mother Teresa is still in the early stages, and (despite her flaws) I think it would be difficult to argue that King Beaudoin would be more deserving..
 
You think that King Badouin would be more deserving than Mother Theresa? Might I ask what you base that opinion on?
 
Well, maybe King Baudouin will be beatified, but I doubt that. I mean, he was a very pious person and that might be the reason for him being beatified. But as far as I know he didn't work any miracles, something that's needed to be beatified. For him become sanctified he needs even more than one miracle.

But the good news for all the people who believe that Baudouin should be beatified: IIRC, those miracles can also take place after one's death. The process of beatification takes years, however. So I would be very suprised to see King Baudouin being beatified somewhere soon, let alone him becoming a saint. :rolleyes:
 
You think that King Badouin would be more deserving than Mother Theresa? Might I ask what you base that opinion on?
For starters, this:

"
MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

. . . .

The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been - she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself - and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than 100 countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
. . . .
Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity", but they had no audience for their story. "

The fanatic, fraudulent Mother Teresa. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine
 
Slate magazine is hardly a reliable or serious publication.

All people, when they have notoriety, have people who will speak out against them. However Mother Theresa has more people who will speak in her favor than not.

Furthermore, there are many religious orders that take vows of poverty. I see nothing wrong with that.

And I've never heard that Mother Theresa was against womens rights.
 
Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive: Media Center: Slate Magazine Launches "Slate V"

Slate magazine is award winning and very well respected, and Christopher Hitchens who wrote that particular piece is an award winning journalist, so I'm not quite sure where you got your information from--care to post it?

I can't say anything other than I feel sorry for you if you don't see anything wrong with poverty, especially given the billions of dollars glamorized on this board alone by people who supposedly work to alleviate it. Just because Mother Teresa may be popular doesn't make her a saint--sometimes one has to be very brave to speak the truth and go against the popular sentiment.

Mother Teresa was no saint and certainly performed no miracles. Now to get this back on track, what else did Baudoin do that might qualify him as such?
 
I work in the communications industry, and I hardly find, as do most of my colleagues, Slate to be a reliable publication when it comes to quite a few topics, most notably politics and religion.

None the less, Christopher Hitchins is relatively known, however he tends to take a decidedly radical angle to his stories, and coupled with the fact that he is one of the very few with anything negative to say about Mother Theresa, his stories must be taken with a grain of salt.

I never said that I found nothing wrong with poverty, please do not twist my words. What I said was that I found nothing wrong with religious orders taking vows of poverty, which means that the order itself does not hold on to any worldly means apart from what is absolutely necessary to survive, and anything else is given to the charities or good works that those orders do.

I never said that Mother Theresa was or should be a saint. However I do find that if one has to choose between Badouin and Mother Theresa, then Mother Theresa is more deserving than Badouin.

Just because the Washington Post duplicates a press release put out by Slate magazine itself, does not mean that the Washington Post is in any way giving accolades to the publication itself. However, since Slate is owned by the same company that owns the Washington Post, it's highly unlikely that they would publish anything unfavorable.
 
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right re the post, but googling slate and awards was what I meant to post. I am just a plain old US citizen, and I don't agree with 99% of what slate writes, but I don't think it's not reliable.

Re poverty, it's one thing if for some reason you keep it upon yourself; it's another to inflict it upon your so-called wards--which appears to be what M Teresa did to those poor kids.
 
I'm sorry Pupo, but I don't understand your most recent post, do you mean the Washington Post?
 
Yes--although of course the Post would argue that it is editorially independent.

Anyway, what did King Baudoin do that people would even consider this type of thing? Did he fund orphanages or hospitals or something like that? Or was he "just" a pious person?
 
I doubt seriously (although I can not say for sure without further research) that Mother Theresa inflicted anything so horrendous on those children. They had schooling, a roof over their head, and food to eat, which is more than a great many children in India, Africa and South America to name a few had.

Unfortunately we live in a society where worth is measured by how much you have and not who you are as a person. I would be willing to bet that those children have a very strong character and can live with just what they need to survive. Not that they should have to have only what they need to survive, but I don't believe for one minute that anyone in Mother Theresa's care was in any way abused or neglected.

Re: King Badouin, that is just my point, he's done nothing that I know of that would make him an option for canonization. He was very pious, but so are many other people.
 
I never said that Mother Theresa was or should be a saint. However I do find that if one has to choose between Badouin and Mother Theresa, then Mother Theresa is more deserving than Badouin.

Well, I can understand you see it that way, but I'd like to add a few nuances. :flowers: It's not for no reason that the process of canonization takes decades, even centuries: there's a lot of research involved and all nuances are looked at carefully. King Baudouin also did a lot of good things, seen from a catholic point of view. He was very pious and devote, a real example for other catholics. Next to that he was also involved in a lot of good, Christian charities and of course he refused to sign the abortion law in the early nineties, which probably didn't go by unnoticed in catholic circles. The problem with beatification is that it's sometimes just comparing apples to oranges when you look at the people who are beatified in the end. If I look at the beatifications which took place in my own country recently, I think one can safely say that these people did things that were of a complete different nature than the things Baudouin or Mother Teresa did and on a much smaller scale. So luckily we aren't the people who have to decide who gets this 'St.' in the end and who doesn't. ;)
 
You think that King Badouin would be more deserving than Mother Theresa? Might I ask what you base that opinion on?

Errr... you got the meaning precisely backwards. I said that Mother Teresa (despite her flaws, as pointed out elsewhere upthread) would be more deserving, at least according to the rules/policies/viewpoints of the Catholic Church.

Slate magazine is hardly a reliable or serious publication
You'd be pretty wrong there. A lot of their investigative journalism is on par with the best world newspapers.

However Mother Theresa has more people who will speak in her favor than not.
Yes, and the same could be said of any historically vilified figure at some point. So that's not really germane. The fact is that criticism of Mother Teresa is rather more widespread than you are accepting. Her veneration of poverty is well-known; she did nothing to actually help alleviate poverty, and in fact did many things to ensure people were kept in a grinding cycle of poverty and suffering.

But that's neither here nor there; I brought her up only to illustrate that someone who many people think is highly deserving of sanctification & canonization is still in the early stages, and that someone like King Beaudoin isn't regarded in the same way.
 
So is there any new information about King Baudoin? I just realised that it's a while since this thread was started.
 
Just a recent article in the Belgian newspapers that it will take a beautification and such will take a very long time. I suppose they looked for something to write about the late king, since on July 31st it will be exactly 15 years ago that he died. The newspaper interviewed Eric de Beukelaer, who is a spokesman for the Belgian conference of Bisshops.

Mr. de Beukelaer says that they are doing research and such, so I suppose somebody claimed a miracle happened after praying to the late king (otherwise what would they research?).
 
Also, the famous Belgian father Damiaan has been sanctified, which makes it easy to expand and think about which other Belgians might receive this honour, and since the King is known as one of the most devout Roman-Catholics of the last 100 years who did not live in a monastary, lapses of this kind are easily made.

As for a miracle, I believe there is some woman who claimes she was cured from cancer really quickly after seeing him and talking to him or something like that. Personally, I am always sceptical when it comes to "sudden cures" to medical problems. But determining what an acceptable miracle is, is a problem for the Church.
 
I think if there would be anyone "ripe" for canonisation in the future, it would have to be Fabiola.
 
King Baudouin will never be blessed said Cardinal Danneels Head of the Belgian Church .

Nowadays there is only one royal which demand to be blessed coming from Solesmes ( France) is send to Rome .It is Ex Empress Zita of Austria whose husband the last Emperor of Austria was the very last person blessed by Pope Jean Paul II, whose parents gave him the surname of Karol as his father was in the Emperor's Army.
 
King Baudouin will never be blessed said Cardinal Danneels Head of the Belgian Church .

Nowadays there is only one royal which demand to be blessed coming from Solesmes ( France) is send to Rome .It is Ex Empress Zita of Austria whose husband the last Emperor of Austria was the very last person blessed by Pope Jean Paul II, whose parents gave him the surname of Karol as his father was in the Emperor's Army.

Fortunately it is not up to the Cardinal who gets in to Heaven (and that is a saint -anyone who goes to heaven). Some in the Vatican today might even have their doubts about the Cardinal considering some of his antics. I know of pro-life groups that already pray to King Baudouin and if their prayers are answered and all is in order his cause will go forward. I'm sure it would not be an issue if not for his refusal to sign the abortion bill. Amongst the monarchs of Europe, who did more? Reading through this thread I think it should be said that sainthood is not based on being the best 'good deed doer' nor even living a totally perfect life. It just means you went to heaven and occasionally the Church will confirm that. For myself, I believe King Baudouin is in heaven (and so a saint) but whether or not the Church ever confirms that belief is up to them.

:belgiumstandard: :belgiumflag:
 
Yesterday I watched the last episode of the -very good- VRT2 documentary on king Baudouin. They finished the programme with Baudouin's funeral where both cardinal Danneels as cardinal Suenens referred to 'the big secret' of king Baudouin, which will become clear in the future. The programme speculated that the most likely thing that they referred to is that (they thought) the king was a saint.
 
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