We had a great time in Brussels, doing what we most enjoy doing on holiday*: visiting churches, resting, and eating. (I also enjoy hunting in second-hand bookshops, and looking for fountain pens and holy cards.) We devoted long stops to the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, Notre-Dame de Bonsecours, St Jean-Bapiste au Béguinage, St Catherine of Alexandria, Notre-Dame des Victoires au Sablon, the Chapel of the Magdalene, St. Nicolas, and Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, with two fruitless stops at Notre-Dame aux Riches Claires.
Margaret also took a workshop on making chocolate truffles, and I walked and browsed.
The churches were breathtaking, as we expect in an ancient Catholic city. We were somewhat charmed by the legend of Béatrice Soetkens, who allegedly had a vision of the Blessed Virgin who prompted her (Béatrice) to sneak to Antwerp to steal ‘the miraculous statue of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw op ‘t Stocxken (“Our Lady on the little stick”)’ from the cathedral; apparently Our Lady was being neglected there, and she would be more fulsomely venerated in Brussels. Sotekens succeeded in her mission, sailing a boat upstream on the Senne to Brussels, despite the lack of a tailwind (some say she had to navigate into the wind), and despite having been detected by a nosy vicar who was frozen in place as she and her husband escaped with the stake-bound Virgin. When the sacred pirates arrived in Brussels, the statue was deposited in the chapel of the Crossbowmen’s Guild (as one does).
Sad to say, the ecclesiastical news from Brussels is not all ‘miraculous delivrance with stolen action figure’. Brussels, and specifically the [pre-cathedral-status] Cathedral of St Gudula. As best I can make out from Wikipedia’s NPOV narration, two clergy of St Gudula’s were caught out engaging in usury, so to distract from their guilt they blamed the Jews of Brussels of stealing consecrated Eucharistic hosts — that is, the very Body of Christ — and desecrating them by stabbing. The primary (alleged) wrongdoer was murdered shortly thereafter; when the alleged secondary malefactors stabbed the hosts, they bled; the alleged desecrators panicked; the hosts were entrusted to a Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity, to take them to the Jewish community in Cologne; instead, she handed the hosts in to the clergy of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, who returned them to the church of St Gudula, where they were kept in a reliquary thereafter. The Duke of Brabant ordered that somewhere between six and twenty of the (relatively few) Jews in Brussels be burned at the stake.
This grim story of scapegoating, blame-shifting, and religious hatred at the expense of Jews (who can have had little to no interest in what Christians did with their consecrated hosts) persisted in city culture and was re-enacted annually as part of the celebration (!) of the miraculous preservation and return of the Eucharistic Body. That annual observance was suppressed in the aftermath of Vatican II, and a brass plaque is now attached to one of the main doors, saying that the accusations were ‘tendentious’ and the overall narrative a legend.
That strikes me as a faint-hearted apology for mob violence conducted under the auspices of the ducal coronet and ecclesiastical authority. Until churches step forward and acknowledge their complicity in acts of hatred and terror, and endeavour to show their penitence by actions of reconciliation and redress, the guilt remains.
On a less somber note, I found a Parker 51 but didn’t buy it; a holy card of St Eve, and did buy it; and a notebook folder with Magritte’s ‘Les mots et les images’ which you bet I bought.
So we had a magnificent time, shadowed by the persistent reminder of how cruel and base (not ‘based’) the church can be. There’s much more to see, but I’m not sure we’ll be going back; there are so many places we haven’t seen at all.
* ‘On holiday’, not ‘visiting family’. There’s a world of difference, even when the latter is a joyous occasion.