VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) –– Describing the recent police blockade of the Brussels National Conservatism conference at which he spoke, Cardinal Gerhard Müller stated that “left-wing fascist activists emphatically welcomed the deprivation of the fundamental right to freedom.”
In a statement provided to LifeSiteNews this evening, Cardinal Müller issued a firm criticism of the crackdown on the Brussels National Conservatism (NatCon) conference, which was held April 16 and 17.
“The compulsive neurotic reaction of anti-discourse ideologues to the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, which was organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation and the Herzl Institute, was predictable,” he said. {The full statement is published below}
The German cardinal was a keynote speaker on the first day of the conference, and was thus a first-hand witness to the police blockade enforced on the event by orders of the local mayor.
As LifeSiteNews has reported, NatCon Brussels catapulted to the fore of international headlines on Tuesday, when the Socialist mayor of the Saint-Josse-ten-Noode municipality – Emir Kir – ordered the police to shut down the two-day conference to “guarantee public safety.”
READ: Socialist Belgian mayor orders police to shut down event featuring Cardinal Müller, Orbán, Farage
Footage and images flooded social media around midday, showing lines of police barricading the conference venue, prohibiting anyone from entering. Those already inside were not allowed back in if they left and high-profile speakers were prevented from entering, as was the planned food catering service.
The blockade was eventually lifted thanks to a court order delivered at 2:30 a.m. April 17, enabling the second day of the conference to take place.
Speaking during the police blockade on Tuesday, Müller described the scenes – which saw police effectively imprison conference attendees inside the venue – as being “like Nazi Germany.”
In his statement, the cardinal attested that the “district mayor and his radical left-wing comrades unintentionally revealed the ideological relapse into absolutist state thinking when, in a fit of shocking self-irony, Brussels was proclaimed a right-wing free zone.”
READ: Brussels NatCon conference will continue freely after court overturns police barricade
Mayor Kir’s actions drew widespread criticism, including from the host nation’s prime minister Alexander De Croo, Hungarian Prime Minister and conference speaker Viktor Orbán, and from the U.K. government – a nation which had two of its more prominent current MPs speaking at the event.
Referencing this condemnation of the anti-NatCon clampdown, Müller said that such criticism was due to the fact that “the elected representative in a democratic community is not the master and owner of his territory.”
“Today,” he said, the spirit of “absolutism… corresponds to the fascist, national socialist, communist, gender-wokist (i.e. anti-marriage and anti-family) and infanticidal (i.e. pro-abortion) ideologues who want to dictate to all inhabitants of the territory they rule what they should think and what they should eat or how they should speak and dress.”
Such politicians or activists, said the cardinal, “consider themselves just as entitled to punish their fellow citizens, branded as dissidents by their fixed ideas, with branding, banishment, deprivation of liberty and confiscation of property (blocking of bank accounts) as the absolutist rulers of the past and the totalitarian political and opinion dictators of today, whose abysmal lack of education is the greatest torture for all those who know how to use their God-given intellect.”
Cardinal Müller’s full statement regarding National Conservative Conference Brussels
The compulsive neurotic reaction of anti-discourse ideologues to the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels (17 April 2024), which was organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation and the Herzl Institute, was predictable. Left-wing fascist activists emphatically welcomed the deprivation of the fundamental right to freedom of assembly of the largely Jewish organizers, participants and speakers of this international and multicultural congress.
However, in their rush of victory over the several hundred visitors – whom they defamed as “right-wing” and “Nazis” – they overlooked the fact that the local mayor responsible, who is responsible for the unlawful instrumentalization of the police, has even been thrown out of the Socialist Party because – as the media report – he is said to have denied the Armenian genocide and is accused of having an unresolved relationship with terrorist groups in Turkey.
As far as my part is concerned, I was not invited as a politician, nor would I have made any party-political statements, but [was invited] as a theologian to discuss the idea of Christian Europe in public with a professor of philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
Anyone who is not blinded by totalitarian ideology in their perception of reality, but recognizes the dignity of man in the image of God as the measure and limit of politics, should know that the Judeo-Christian tradition of Europe is the best means of salvation against the attack on fundamental human rights and the slide of pluralist democracies into totalitarian systems of rule (cf. the studies by Hannah Arendt and the Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon on the alternative of liberal and totalitarian democracy).
The aforementioned district mayor and his radical left-wing comrades unintentionally revealed the ideological relapse into absolutist state thinking when, in a fit of shocking self-irony, Brussels was proclaimed a right-wing free zone.
The competent judicial authorities and many representatives of European constitutional states have condemned his actions as anti-democratic. This is because the elected representative in a democratic community is not the master and owner of his territory: according to the principle of early modern absolutism, “whose land – whose is the religion/confession” (cuius regio – eius religio), i.e. that the holder of political power has the right to impose his own creed on citizens, subjects and serfs by force. Today, this corresponds to the fascist, national socialist, communist, gender-wokist (i.e. anti-marriage and anti-family) and infanticidal (i.e. pro-abortion) ideologues who want to dictate to all inhabitants of the territory they rule what they should think and what they should eat or how they should speak and dress.
They consider themselves just as entitled to punish their fellow citizens, branded as dissidents by their fixed ideas, with branding, banishment, deprivation of liberty and confiscation of property (blocking of bank accounts) as the absolutist rulers of the past and the totalitarian political and opinion dictators of today, whose abysmal lack of education is the greatest torture for all those who know how to use their God-given intellect.
Gerhard Card. Müller, Rome.