Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo criticised Pope Francis for the Catholic Church’s horrific legacy of sexual abuse and cover-up in his country, demanding “concrete steps” to acknowledge the past, according to Burnaby Now.
Today, words alone do not suffice. We also need concrete steps. Victims need to be heard. They need to be at the center. They have a right to truth. Misdeeds need to be recognised. When something goes wrong, we cannot accept cover-ups. To be able to look into the future, the church needs to come clean on its past.
De Croo’s speech was one of the harshest ever addressed to the Pope during a foreign trip. Even King Philippe voiced strong words for Francis, demanding that the church work ‘incessantly’ to redeem crimes and help victims heal.
Their tone emphasised how gross the abuse scandal was in Belgium, where systematic cover-ups undermined confidence in the Catholic Church. The pontiff, for his part, applauded at the end of De Croo’s speech and was expected to meet with victims in private later Friday.
This is our shame and humiliation.
Revelations about abuse horrors in Belgium have been surfacing for a quarter of a century. In 2010, it erupted 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 after his resignation, Belgian police carried out unprecedented searches of Belgian church offices, the home of recently retired Archbishop Godfried Danneels and even in the prelate’s crypt. The Vatican called it a “deplorable” violation.
Horrors of Catholic Church
Victims and advocates argue that the true scope of the scandal is much broader. Police eventually returned documentation seized during the 2010 raids to the church, dashing hopes of a criminal investigation.
Amid public outrage following the release of a four-episode Flemish documentary “Godvergeten” (Godforsaken), where for the first time Belgian victims told their stories on camera one by one, both a Flanders parliamentary committee and Belgium’s federal parliament launched official investigations last year.
However, after a staggering reprimand by the prime minister and King, Francis deviated from the script to express the church’s shame over the scandal and to voice his commitment to ending it.
The church must be ashamed and ask for forgiveness and try to resolve this situation with Christian humility and put all the possibilities in places so that this doesn’t happen again. But even if it were only one (victim), it is enough to be ashamed.
Victims has demanded the church do much more, including implementing robust reparation programmes to compensate them for their injuries and pay for the lifelong therapy many need.
When Francis met with survivors of forced adoptions in Ireland in 2018, he offered a comprehensive apology on behalf of the church. This is an issue the Argentine pope understands well, given Argentina’s own history with forced adoptions of children born since the 1970s.
Belgium’s acting justice minister, Paul Van Tigchelt, called forced adoptions “horror practices by the church.” There are no official figures, but HLN media group, which brought the issue to the spotlight again last year, estimates that up to 30,000 people have been affected.
