VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis is traveling to Belgium this week, fresh from a tour of four countries in Asia where he saw record crowds and vibrant church communities, as the once a strict Catholic country is once again confronted with the horrific legacy of clergy sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups.
He will receive a sobering welcome: survivors of abuse have written an open letter to Francis, asking him to set up a universal system of church reparations and take responsibility for the crimes. the devastation that abuse has caused on their lives.
The open letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, will be personally delivered to Francis when he meets with 15 survivors during his four-day visit beginning Thursday, said the Rev. Rik Deville, who has advocated for victims of abuse for more than a quarter century.
Another unpleasant welcome came from the Belgian parliament, which has spent the past year listening to heartbreaking stories from victims about priests who committed predation and this week announced a follow-up investigation. The extent? How Belgian judicial and law enforcement authorities bungled a massive 2010 criminal investigation into the church’s sex crimes.
None of this was foreseen when Belgian King Philippe and Queen Mathilde met Francis at the Vatican Apostolic Palace on September 14, 2023 and invited him to visit. Commemorating 600th anniversary of the founding of the two Catholic universities in Belgium.
That anniversary is in fact the reason for Francis’ trip, which also includes a stop in Luxembourg on Thursday and a Mass on Sunday in Brussels to beatify a 17th-century mystical nun.
And in Belgium, Francis will visit the French and Flemish campuses from the University of Leuven: Immigration and climate, according to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni.
But Bruni admitted in a rare preview that Francis will certainly raise Belgium’s abuse record.
“It is clear that the Pope is aware of the difficulty and that there has been suffering in Belgium for years. We can certainly expect a reference in that sense,” Bruni said.
The revelations about the horrific abuse scandal in Belgium have been gradually emerging over a quarter of a century, culminating in the shocking year of 2010, when the country’s longest-serving bishop, Bishop of Bruges Roger Vangheluwewas allowed to resign without punishment after he admitted to sexually abusing his cousin for 13 years.
Two months later, Belgian police carried out unprecedented raids on Belgian churches, the home of recently retired Archbishop Godfried Danneels and even the crypt of a prelate – a desecration the Vatican at the time labeled “reprehensible.”
Danneels, a longtime friend of Francis, was caught on tape trying to convince Vangheluwe’s nephew to keep quiet until the bishop retired. And finally, in September 2010, the church released a 200-page report compiled by child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens, who said 507 people had come forward with stories of abuse by priests, even when they were as young as 2 years old. He identified at least 13 suicides by victims and attempts by six more.
And despite everything that was known and already in the public domain, the scandal reared its head in a shocking new way last year, when the public broadcaster VRT broadcast a four-part Flemish documentary, “Godvergeten” (God Forgotten), in the weeks surrounding the royal visit to the Vatican.
For the first time, Belgian victims told their stories one by one in front of the camera. In this way, the Flemish viewer in their living room was confronted with the scale of the scandal in their community, the depravity of the crimes and the systematic cover-up of them by the Catholic hierarchy.
“We didn’t do anything new. We just put everything together. We put the voices together,” says Ingrid Schildermans, the researcher and filmmaker behind Godvergeten. “We put all the events on a timeline, so they couldn’t say, ‘It’s one bad apple.’”
“That was what the documentary made clear, it really is a system and there really are people who look away or don’t care,” she said in an interview.
Amid the public outcry that followed, both a committee of the Flemish parliament and the federal parliament of Belgium launched official investigations and spent months hearing testimony from victims, experts and the Catholic hierarchy.
Their testimonies once again draw attention to a scandal that has long been responsible for the sharp decline of the Catholic Church in Belgium. The church authorities there do not even publish statistics on the number of weekly mass attendances, because the monthly number is already less than ten.
In March, now that a papal visit has already been announced, Francis finally took action and dismissed Vangheluwe, 14 years after he admitted to abusing his nephew. The laicization was seen as a clear attempt by the Vatican to dampen the outrage and remove a clear problem that clouded Francis’ visit.
The parliamentary investigations were completed in May, before the country’s elections. But one question remained: what ever happened to Operation Chalice, the much-vaunted police raids on Danneels’ home and other church offices in 2010.
Hundreds of boxes of documents seized by police were returned to the church in 2014 and the criminal investigation was effectively suspended, according to victims’ lawyers Christine Mussche and Walter Van Steenbrugge. They have complained about what they call a “hallucinatory series of irregularities and illegalities (that) have decapitated the investigation and deprived survivors of clerical sexual abuse of their fundamental right to a fair trial.”
The parliamentary inquiry, as part of its mandate, had looked into “possible dysfunctions” in the criminal investigation and specifically whether there was “political, financial, national or foreign intervention, incitement, pressure and influence” in the failed case.
Because the investigation was not completed before new elections, a follow-up investigation into “Operation Chalice” was announced on Tuesday.
All of this has left a bitter taste in the Belgian public in the run-up to Francis’ visit, not least because Francis continued to maintain close ties with Danneels even after his cover-up came to light, and again showed ignorance of the Belgian problem when he appointed the retired bishop of Ghent a cardinal in 2022. The bishop rejected the honor because of his bad reputation for abuse.
The visit has also led to new trauma in some cases for victims. Some of them wanted to meet the pope, but were told by church authorities that they had not passed the selection, Schildermans said.
“It’s a very, very stressful and frustrating time for them,” she said.
It’s a very different atmosphere than the An overwhelming welcome Francis received in Asia less than two weeks ago and far removed from the excitement that surrounded Saint John Paul II when he toured Belgium in 1985.
Even De Standaard, one of Belgium’s leading daily newspapers, long considered the most Catholic, ran a major weekend broadcast with the headline “How revolutionary is Pope Francis really?” The clincher: not really.
On Tuesday it became clear again how the terrible history of abuse, cover-ups and insensitivity towards victims in Belgium influenced Francis’ visit.
Bishop Patrick Hoogmartens of North Limburg announced that he will not participate in festive papal gatherings, after it became known that he had just delivered a eulogy for a priest involved in an abuse case.
“I did not estimate that it would hurt a victim of abuse from the 1970s,” he told TV Limburg.
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Casert reported from Brussels.
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