Pope hears from Belgian king and abuse victims over scandals and lack of response

for a wild day Pope FrancisThe Belgian king, his prime minister, and the rector of the Catholic university who invited him here entered the institution he heads with various sins: covering up cases of sexual abuse by clergy and falling far behind the times in embracing women. and the LGBTQ+ community in the church.

And all this was before Francis met the people most harmed by the attack. catholic church Men and women who were raped and abused by priests as children in Belgium. Seventeen abuse survivors spent two hours with Francis on Friday evening, telling him of their trauma, shame and pain, and demanding compensation from the church.

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Despite all this, Francis expressed regret, asked for forgiveness and promised to do everything possible to ensure that such abuses never happen again. “This is our shame and humiliation,” he said in his first public speech on Belgian soil.

Francis has previously visited countries with miserable legacies of church errors. He made a sweeping apology to Irish victims of abuse in 2018 and left for Canada in 2022 to atone for church-run residential schools that have traumatized Indigenous people for generations.

But it is hard to think of a single day when the leader of the 1.3 billion-strong Catholic Church has faced such strong, public criticism from a country’s highest institutional figures – the royal family, government and academia – for the church’s crimes and apparent misdeeds. reacts tone-deaf to the demands of today’s Catholics.

Luc Sels, rector of the Catholic University of Leuven, whose 600th anniversary was the official reason for Francis’ trip to Belgium, told the pope that the abuse scandals had so weakened the church’s moral authority that it would do well to reform if it wanted to. to regain credibility and relevance.

“Wouldn’t the church be a warmer place if women were also given a prominent place in the priesthood?” Sells asked the pope.

“Wouldn’t the church in our area have gained moral authority if its approach to gender and diversity had not been so rigid? And if it had, wouldn’t it have opened its arms more to the LGBTQ+ community, as the university did?” he asked.

The comments certainly reflected the views of European social progressives. But they also to some extent reflected the reformist church that Francis has espoused in his effort to make the universal church more relevant and responsive to today’s Catholics.

The day began with King Philippe welcoming Francis to Laeken Castle, the residence of the Belgian royal family, and citing abuse and forced adoption scandals, demanding that the church work “non-stop” to redress crimes and help victims heal.

He was followed Prime Minister Alexander De CrooHe was also allowed to give a speech, an exception to typical Vatican protocol. He used the opportunity of a face-to-face public meeting to confess the full extent of the abuse scandal and demand “concrete steps” to put the interests of victims ahead of those of the church.

“Victims’ voices need to be heard. They need to be at the center. They have the right to know the truth. Bad behavior needs to be recognized,” he told the Pope. he said. “We cannot accept cover-ups when something goes wrong,” he said. “The church needs to clean up its past in order to look to the future.”

It was one of the most remarkable welcome addresses addressed to the pope during a foreign trip where the polite prescriptions of diplomatic protocol generally kept public statements free from insults.

But the tone highlighted how raw the abuse scandal still is in Belgium; where two decades of abuse revelations and systematic cover-ups have destroyed the credibility of the hierarchy and contributed to an overall decline in Catholicism and the influence of the once-powerful church.

In general, victims welcomed the words of both the church and the state. Survivor Emmanuel Henckens said, “To some extent, they were right in the middle of the evil. It was no longer possible to look the other way.”

But Koen Van Sumere, another abuse survivor, said it was now essential for the church to provide significant financial payments to victims.

“If you want to move towards forgiveness and reconciliation, just saying ‘I’m sorry’ is not enough; you have to bear the consequences and pay compensation for the damages,” Van Sumere said. he said. He said the money the Belgian church had paid so far was “the amount of charity” and that the compensation he had received for his abuse did not even cover the cost of therapy.

The 17 victims met with Francis at his Vatican residence on Friday evening and wrote an open letter to him demanding a universal system of church compensation for their trauma. In the statement made after the meeting, the Vatican said it would review Francis’ requests.

“The Pope was able to listen to their suffering and get closer to them, express his gratitude for their courage, feel ashamed for the pain they suffered as children because of the priests to whom they were entrusted, and noted the requests made to him, and said in the statement made by the Vatican spokesman, “We can examine them.”

Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal unfolded on and off for more than a quarter of a century, culminating in the bombshell 2010 when the country’s longest-serving bishop, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges, was allowed to resign with impunity after admitting to sexually abusing his nephew. For 13 years.

Francis only defrocked Vangheluwe earlier this year, in a move designed to defuse an ongoing source of anger among Belgians ahead of his visit.

In September 2010, the church released a 200-page report stating that 507 people came forward with stories of abuse by priests. The report identified at least 13 victim suicides and six suicide attempts.

Victims and advocates say these findings are just the tip of the iceberg and that the true scope of the scandal is much larger.

In his speech, Francis insisted that the church was “firmly and decisively addressing” the problem of abuse by implementing prevention programs, listening to victims and accompanying them to recovery.

But after the surprising humiliation from the prime minister and the king, Francis went off script to express the church’s shame at the scandal and his determination to end it.

“The Church should be ashamed, ask for forgiveness and try to resolve this situation with Christian humility and put in place all possibilities so that this does not happen again,” Francis said. he said. “But even if it’s just one person (the victim), it’s enough to be ashamed.”

The prime minister, king and pope also touched on a new church-related scandal rocking Belgium over so-called “forced adoptions”, echoing earlier revelations about Ireland’s so-called mother and baby homes.

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After the Second World War and until the 1980s, many single mothers were forced by the Belgian church to give their newborn babies up for adoption, with money changing hands.

Francis said he was “saddened” to learn of these practices, but said such crimes were “unfortunately mixed with the prevailing opinion in all segments of society at the time.”