Revelations about Belgium’s horrific sex abuse scandal have trickled in since 2010, when the country’s most senior bishop was allowed to resign without sanction after admitting to sexually abusing his nephew.
After a tour in four Asian countrieswhere he saw record crowds and vibrant church communities, Pope Francis is visiting Belgium this week, as the once staunchly Catholic country once again confronts its appalling legacy of sexual abuse by clergy and of cover-up on the part of institutions.
The reception here will be far from a triumph: survivors of sexual abuse have written an open letter to Francis, asking him to launch a universal system of reparations by the Church and to take responsibility for the damage that the abuse has caused. caused in their lives.
François greeted the journalists at the start of the flight, but did not want to walk down the aisle to greet them one by one, as he usually does.
“I don’t feel up to making the trip. I’ll greet you from here,” he said, referring to the trip down the aisle.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the decision was due to the logistics of the plane, which has only one aisle, and the short duration of the flight, and did not reflect the the state of health of Mr. François.
In a cascade of events highlighting how easily scandals still surface, a bishop initially had to withdraw from the pope’s trip because he had recently praised a priest known to have been involved in a case of abuse.
Late Wednesday, the pope’s main mass had to be modified because the final hymn was composed by a known abuser.
The open letter will be hand-delivered to Francis when he meets with 15 survivors during his four-day visit starting Thursday, according to the Rev. Rik Devillé, who has been an advocate for abuse survivors for more than a quarter century.
Another unpleasant reception came from the Belgian parliament, which spent the last year listening to victims tell harrowing stories of predatory priests and this week announced the opening of an investigation.
The purpose of the investigation? The way in which the Belgian judicial and police authorities botched a vast criminal investigation carried out in 2010 into sexual crimes committed by the Church.
None of this was expected when King Philippe and Queen Mathilde met Francis at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on September 14, 2023 and invited him to come and commemorate the 600th anniversary of the founding of Belgium’s two Catholic universities.
The anniversary is technically the reason for Francis’ trip, which also includes a stopover in Luxembourg on Thursday and a mass on Sunday in Brussels to beatify a mystical 17th-century nun.
Abuses will be “evoked” by the Pope
In Belgium, François will talk about two of his priorities during his visits to the French and Flemish campuses of the University of Louvain: immigration and the climate, according to Mr. Bruni.
But the Vatican spokesperson acknowledged, in a rare preview, that Francis will certainly raise the issue of abuses committed in Belgium.
“It is clear that the pope is aware of the difficulty, and that for years there has been suffering in Belgium, and we can certainly expect a reference in this sense,” Mr. Bruni said.
Revelations about Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal have come in bits and pieces over a quarter of a century, punctuated by the bombshell year of 2010, when the country’s most senior bishop country, the bishop of Bruges Roger Vangheluwehas been authorized to resign without sanction, after admitting to sexually abusing his nephew for 13 years.
Two months later, the Belgian police carried out unprecedented searches in the offices of the Belgian Church, at the archbishop’s home Godfried Danneelswho had just retired, and even in the crypt of a prelate – a violation that the Vatican described at the time as “deplorable”.
Mgr Danneelsa long-time friend of François, was filmed trying to persuade Bishop Vangheluwe’s nephew to keep quiet until the bishop retires.
Finally, in September 2010, the Church released a 200-page report by child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens, which stated that 507 people came forward to say that they had been victims of touching from priests, even when they were only two years old. He identified at least 13 victim suicides and attempts by six others.
God’s abandonment
Despite everything that was known and already in the public domain, the scandal shockingly resurfaced last year, when a four-part Flemish documentary, “Godvergeten” (Forsaken), was broadcast on the public channel VRT in the weeks leading up to the royal visit to the Vatican.
For the first time, Belgian victims told their stories on camera, one after the other, showing Flemish viewers, in their living rooms, the extent of the scandal in their community, the depravity of the crimes and their systematic cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy.
“We didn’t bring anything new. We just put it all together. We put the voices together,” said Ingrid Schildermans, the researcher and director behind Godvergeten. “We put all the things that happened on a timeline, so they couldn’t say ‘that’s a bad apple.’
Faced with public outrage, a Flemish parliamentary commission and the Belgian federal parliament opened official investigations and heard testimonies for months from victims, experts and the Catholic hierarchy.
These testimonies drew attention to a scandal which had already been blamed for the brutal decline of the Catholic Church for a generation in Belgium, where ecclesiastical authorities do not even publish statistics on weekly mass attendancebecause the monthly rate is already less than 10%.
In March, with a papal visit already announced, Francis finally took action and defrocked Vangheluwe, 14 years after he admitted to abusing his nephew. This secularization was seen as an obvious attempt by the Vatican to dampen outrage and eliminate an obvious problem that was clouding Francis’ visit.
A colder atmosphere
All this left a bitter taste in the Belgian public before François’ visit, not least because the latter remained close to Danneels even after his cover-up was revealed, and he once again showed his ignorance of the Belgian problem by naming the retired bishop of Ghent cardinal in 2022. The bishop declined the honor due to his poor history of abuse.
The visit also, in some cases, retraumatized the victims, some of whom had sought to meet the pope only to be told by church authorities that they had not been accepted, Mr. Schildermans said.
The atmosphere is very different from the enthusiastic welcome given to Francis in Asia less than two weeks agoand far from the excitement that surrounded John Paul II during his tour of Belgium in 1985.
Even De Standaard, one of Belgium’s leading daily newspapers, long considered the most Catholic, published a widely read article this weekend under the headline “Is Pope Francis Really Revolutionary?”
On Tuesday, new evidence emerged that Belgium’s terrible record of abuse, cover-up and insensitivity towards victims had overshadowed Archbishop Francis’ visit.
The bishop Patrick Hoogmartensfrom North Limburg, announced that he would not take part in the papal celebrations, after it was revealed that he had just praised a priest who was known to have been involved in an abuse case.
“I didn’t think it could hurt a victim of abuse from the 1970s,” he told TV Limburg.
Late Wednesday, a spokesperson for the ecclesiastical authorities, Geert De Kerpel, confirmed information from the VRT according to which, at the eleventh hour, the choir will have to repeat a new closing hymn, otherwise the pope would have listened the melody of a priest composer who was a notorious abuser.