Belgium’s horrific history of abuse overshadows Pope’s trip – survivors demand compensation

VATICAN CITY — Fresh from a four-country tour of Asia where he witnessed record-breaking crowds and vibrant church communities, Pope Francis is traveling to Belgium this week, where the once staunchly Catholic country is once again grappling with its horrific legacy of clerical sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups.

He will receive a sobering reception: victims of abuse have written an open letter to Francis calling on him to introduce a universal system of ecclesiastical reparation and to take responsibility for the destruction that abuse has caused in their lives.

The open letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, will be delivered to Francis personally when he meets with 15 survivors during his four-day visit that begins Thursday, said the Rev. Rik Deville, who has advocated for abuse victims for more than a quarter century.

Another uncomfortable reception came from the Belgian parliament, which last year listened to victims’ gruesome stories of sexually abusive priests and this week announced a follow-up investigation. The scope? How Belgian judicial and law enforcement authorities botched a major criminal investigation into the church’s sex crimes in 2010.

None of this was foreseeable when Belgian King Philippe and Queen Mathilde met with Francis at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on September 14, 2023, inviting him to visit to mark the 600th anniversary of the founding of Belgium’s two Catholic universities.

This anniversary is actually the reason for Francis’ trip, which also includes a stop in Luxembourg on Thursday and a Mass on Sunday in Brussels for the beatification of a 17th-century mystical nun.

And in Belgium, Francis will speak about two of his favorite topics: immigration and climate, during visits to the French and Flemish campuses of the University of Leuven, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said.

But Bruni admitted in a rare preview that Francis would certainly improve Belgium’s abuse record.

“The Pope is obviously aware of the difficulties and knows that there has been suffering in Belgium for years. We can certainly expect some indication in this regard,” Bruni said.

Revelations about Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal trickled out piecemeal over the course of a quarter of a century, punctuated by the sensational year of 2010, when the country’s longest-serving bishop, Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, was allowed to resign without punishment after admitting to sexually abusing his nephew for 13 years.

Two months later, Belgian police raided Belgian church offices, the home of recently retired Archbishop Godfried Danneels, and even the crypt of a prelate – a violation the Vatican condemned at the time as “regrettable.”

Danneels, a longtime friend of Francis, was filmed trying to silence Vangheluwe’s nephew until the bishop retired. Finally, in September 2010, the church released a 200-page report by child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens, which said 507 people had come forward to say they had been abused by priests, including some as young as two years old. It identified at least 13 suicides by victims and suicide attempts by six others.

And despite everything that was already known and public knowledge, the scandal flared up again in a shocking way last year when, in the weeks surrounding the royal visit to the Vatican, the public broadcaster VRT broadcast the four-part Flemish documentary “Godvergeten” (Godforsaken).

For the first time, Belgian victims told their stories one by one on camera, 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 everything together. We brought the voices together,” said Ingrid Schildermans, the researcher and filmmaker behind Godvergeten. “We put everything that happened on a timeline so no one can say, ‘That’s a bad apple.'”

“The documentary made it clear: This is really a system, and there are people who look the other way or don’t care,” she said in an interview.

Amid the public outrage that followed, both a parliamentary committee in Flanders and the Belgian federal parliament launched official investigations and listened to months of testimony from victims, experts and the Catholic hierarchy.

Their statements draw renewed attention to a scandal that has already been blamed for the sharp decline of the Catholic Church in Belgium over the past generation. In that country, church authorities do not even publish statistics on weekly Mass attendance, because the monthly figure is already in single figures.

In March, when a papal visit had already been announced, Francis finally took action and defrocked Vangheluwe, 14 years after he admitted to sexually assaulting his nephew. The laicization was seen as a clear attempt by the Vatican to contain outrage and remove an obvious problem that overshadowed Francis’ visit.

The parliamentary investigations were completed in May, ahead of the country’s elections, but one question remained unanswered: what happened to Operation Chalice, the high-profile police raids on Danneels’ residence and other church offices in 2010?

Hundreds of boxes of documents seized by police had to be returned to the church in 2014 and the criminal investigation was essentially closed, according to victims’ lawyers Christine Mussche and Walter Van Steenbrugge, who denounced a “hallucinatory sequence of irregularities and illegalities” that decapitated the investigation and deprived victims of clerical sexual abuse of their fundamental right to a fair trial.

As part of its mandate, the parliamentary inquiry had examined the “possible dysfunctions” in the criminal investigation and, in particular, whether there was “any political, financial, national or foreign interference, instigation, pressure or influence” in connection with the failed case.

Since the investigation could not be completed before the new elections, a follow-up investigation into “Operation Chalice” was announced on Tuesday.

All this left a rather bitter aftertaste in the Belgian public in the run-up to Francis’ visit, not least because Francis remained close to Danneels even after his cover-up was exposed and again showed ignorance of Belgium’s problems when he appointed the Bishop Emeritus of Ghent a cardinal in 2022. The bishop declined the honor because of his poor record on dealing with abuse.

In some cases, the visit also led to renewed trauma for the victims. Some of them had tried to meet the Pope, but were then told by the church authorities that they were not eligible, says Schildermans.

“It’s a very, very stressful and frustrating time for them,” she said.

The atmosphere is very different from the enthusiastic reception Francis received in Asia less than two weeks ago, nor does it have anything to do with the excitement that surrounded Saint John Paul II when he toured Belgium in 1985.

Even De Standaard, one of the largest Belgian daily newspapers, which was long considered the most Catholic, published a large edition at the weekend under the headline “How revolutionary is Pope Francis really?” The clear message: Not really.

Tuesday provided further evidence of how Belgium’s horrific record of abuse, cover-ups and insensitivity toward victims had overshadowed Francis’ visit.

Bishop Patrick Hoogmartens of North Limburg announced that he would not attend the Pope’s celebrations after it became known that he had just paid warm tribute to a priest who was proven to be involved in an abuse case.

“I did not come to the conclusion that it would hurt a victim of abuse from the 1970s,” he told TV Limburg.

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Casert reported from Brussels.