Was Belgian King Baudouin a Saint? An African Cardinal Has Doubts
Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, Archbishop of Kinshasa, warned on Tuesday against the hasty beatification of former Belgian King Baudouin I (1930-1993).
He cited a "black mark" linked to Baudouin's alleged role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961), the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
After a military coup, Lumumba was captured and, with the help of Belgians, tortured and executed.
The final stage of the execution was carried out by the Belgian contractors, led by police chief Frans Verscheure. Lumumba was put in front of a tree and shot. Four Belgian officers, under the command of the Belgian authorities, were present.
The next morning, Belgian gendarmerie officer Gerard Soete and his team dug up the bodies, dismembered them and dissolved them in sulphuric acid, while the bones were ground up and scattered.
Lumumba's murder allowed the regimes of Belgium, the US and reportedly the UK to abandon their own assassination plots. In 2002, Belgium formally …More
The bar is so low for these so-called saints. The only impediment is not being "politically correct." Hence, we will NEVER see a Pope St. Pius XII!
A bishop worried about a Communist getting what he deserved.
Your post is outrageous and profoundly anti-Christian. Torturing or murdering a human being in cold blood, Bolshevik style, is a grave sin, regardless of the man's ideology. Anyway, I don't think the Belgian government had Lumumba murdered because of any ideological opposition to communism, but because Lumumba was a nationalist hero who had rightly criticized Belgian colonialism (and the bloody role of Leopold II) right to King Baudoin's face.
A saint does not take part in a plot to murder someone in cold blood, or hear about it from ministers (as King Baudoin did) then do nothing about it. The African bishop is entirely correct to bring this up.
I don't think he's a saint at all.
But Lumumba was a communist and his followers were some of the bloodiest terrorist ever.
Had he lived, Lumumba would probably have inflicted the same sort of socialist economic policies that blighted African economies for the first 50 years after independence on Congo (not that Mobutu did any better). Regardless, Lumumba did not deserve to be humiliated (forced to eat his own speech, literally) and tortured by Belgians who wanted to keep the Congo under their thumb one way or another.
I assume your statement that "his followers were some of the bloodiest terrorist ever" is referring to Pierre Mulele. His gang did horrible things, after Lumumba had been assassinated. You cannot hold Lumumba responsible for what Mulele did after his death.
I never trust a FrancisSaint. Still, who knows what he knew or didn’t know. After reading about it, it looks like all-out anarchy was going on in that region. It was sad, but who knows if he knew the whole story of what was going down.
“The very fact that the world is a thousand times more scandalized at a bad Catholic in public life than a bad anything else, is only a proof that the world expected much more of him.” (Venerable Fulton J. Sheen)
The people of the Congo suffered unthinkable, unspeakable horror at the hands of the Belgium's for many years.
@Paul DeRousse.... It is a very well known historical fact... From 1885 to 1908, many atrocities were committed in the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the absolute rule of King Leopold II of Belgium.
From Wikipedia... next time look before you leap.
Wiki?
The place, that if you use if for a source will get you a failed grade in any collage?
HAHAHAHA!
Try reading a real book and not some leftist trash website!
You must think that Snoops is real too.
@Paul DeRousse...It seems you level of education indicates you must have failed kindergarten.