The fate of children takes a particular centre-stage in the Gospels. Jesus articulates ethics that warn in the starkest terms about the importance of protecting children. So it is perhaps not surprising that the treatment of children might become a battle ground in the struggle between the opposing cultures of a growing secularism and the residual Catholic culture in Europe.
In this intensifying conflict the claims of the state to take precedence over parents in the control and protection of children have produced shock, surprise and opposition.
It would be unfair not to recognise that the state has recently found it difficult to manage its self-appointed responsibilities to act as a final protector of the welfare of children with the increase in child abuse.
As a result the agents of the secular state harbour increasingly dark suspicions about the vulnerability of children.
Every parent in recent years has dreaded the moment when a child injures itself and a journey to hospital emergency treatment is called for, and they face probing suspicious questions: “How did this bruise happen?”
Suspicions have however been running both ways.
Parents are increasingly questioning and protesting against what the state is teaching their pre-pubescent children in sex education classes. Parents have begun to feel the need to protect their children against ideological abuse by the state.
The agencies of education have been fending parents off, refusing to grant them access to the syllabus, claiming either they have no right to know, or that publishing it infringes some form of mercantile copyright belonging to the aggressively ideological agency the school has employed to aid in the advancing of sexualisation.
Mutual suspicion recently blew up into full blown conflict in a highly unusual case of a Dutch doctor and his wife who ended up seeking political asylum in Poland as they fled the Dutch and Belgian governments.
Both the parents and government agencies claimed they were protecting the children in question from each other. Dr Leonard Hermans and his family fled first the Dutch government and then the Belgian authorities as the European state issued a Europe-wide arrest warrant against them on a charge of kidnapping their own children.
The idea that parents can kidnap their own children is of course predicated on the assumption that the state has a prior ownership and claim to our children. This is something that few parents are likely to accept.
What were the facts that led to the Dutch government taking the action it did?
The facts now in the public domain are as banal as they are alarming.
Leonard Herman is a doctor and his wife is a lawyer. After a death in the family there was a falling out over the inheritance. Mr Herman’s sister felt deeply aggrieved at the outcome and sought revenge (it was claimed). So she denounced her brother and sister-in-law to the Dutch social services claiming that her nephews and nieces were victims of child abuse.
A case file was put together by the authorities, but the Hermans were denied access to the case file. Unilaterally, the authorities took the decision to remove the children from the parents on the basis of the accusation.
Unable to contest the decision, the Hermans family migrated to Germany and then Belgium. However, they were finally tracked down by authorities, and upon receiving a summons to appear in the Belgian family court, they fled to Poland.
The court tried them in absentia and sentenced them to four years in prison for having “kidnapped” their children.
This was the point at which the Hermans applied for political asylum in Poland.
The Polish authorities examined the dossier that the Belgian prosecuting authorities presented on behalf of the Dutch social services and announced that having done so they found the accusations wholly unconvincing and the claims made against the parents “far-fetched”.
The Polish justice ministry announced its findings at a public press conference on August 31st. It declared that the Polish court had unilaterally revoked the European Arrest Warrant issued by the Belgian authorities against Leonard Hermans.
The Minister of Justice, to the surprise of many, used direct and uncompromising language in repudiating the actions of the Dutch and Belgian authorities. Their spokesman, Michał Wójcik, a member of the Council of Ministers, announced:
“Unlike the soulless officials in the Netherlands and Belgium, in Poland there were no reasons to hand over the children to the Dutch authorities and arrest their father. The evidence presented by the Belgian side, which was supposed to prove the ‘disturbing’ situation of the children, turned out to be far-fetched. As a result, the father and his four children can stay in Poland.”
“Mr. Hermans and his children are the best proof that Poland is a country of freedom, where the well-being and the safety of families comes first.”
Speaking at the conference, Leonard Hermans said that, unlike the Netherlands, where he and his family were “persecuted”, Poland, which took them in, struck him as a “hot shower”.
The Netherlands, he continued, “takes the lead [within the context of the EU] in punishing Poland for its rule of law violations. Yet, while the Netherlands points the finger at Poland … it violates the rights of children and parents every day.”
He concluded: “We have suffered tremendous financial and emotional damage because of this. But it is worth it to us since we still have our children.
The Deputy Justice Minister Marcin Warchoł said that the case was further evidence that Poland is a country that takes family policy seriously and protects it. He clarified that while real abuse is tackled in Poland, the country does not take children from their parents on the basis of spurious or anonymous claims, or because of financial problems a family may face.
Beyond the specifics of this tragic case, its exposure of new fault lines along the boundary provided by historic Catholicism is a new phenomenon.
The stance taken by the Polish government is informed and energised by the values of Polish culture which reflect the priorities of the Catholicism in which the nation has been historically rooted. These priorities place the defence of children at the top of a list of political and moral policies.
As abortion, euthanasia (applied in Belgian recently to depressive adolescents), and the hyper-sexualisation of children in education gather pace, we may find more conflicts between parents and the state coalescing behind a land in the cultural sand that Catholic tradition and allegiance draw in an increasingly hostile Europe.
(Dr Leonard Hermans and his children during a press conference with the Polish minister of Justice | Youtube screen shot)
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