Belgium's appalling abuse legacy clouds pope's trip as survivors pen letter seeking reparations

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Fresh off a four-nation tour of Asia, where he saw record-setting crowds and vibrant church communities, Pope Francis travels to Belgium this week as the once-staunchly Catholic country again confronts its appalling legacy of clergy sex abuse and institutional cover-up.

He will receive a sobering welcome: Abuse survivors have penned an open letter to Francis, asking him to launch a universal system of church reparations and assume responsibility for the wreckage that abuse has wrought on their lives.

The open letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, will be hand delivered to Francis when he meets with 15 survivors during his four-day visit starting Thursday, according to the Rev. Rik Deville, who has been advocating on behalf of abuse survivors for over a quarter-century.

Another unpleasant welcome has come from Belgium’s parliament, which spent the past year hearing victims recount harrowing stories of predator priests and this week announced a follow-on investigation. The scope? 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 with Francis in the Vatican Apostolic Palace on Sept. 14, 2023 and invited him to visit to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the founding of Belgium’s two Catholic universities.

That 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 17th century mystic nun.

And in Belgium, Francis will speak about two of his pet priorities during visits to the French and Flemish campuses of the Leuven university: Immigration and climate, according to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni.

But Bruni acknowledged in a rare preview that Francis will certainly raise Belgium’s abuse record.

“Clearly the pope is aware of the difficulty, and that for years there has been suffering in Belgium, and certainly we can expect a reference in this sense,” Bruni said.

Revelations of Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal have dribbled out in bits over a quarter-century, punctuated by the bombshell year in 2010, when the country's longest-serving bishop, Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, was allowed to resign without punishment, after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew for 13 years.

Two months later, Belgian police staged what were then unprecedented raids on Belgian church offices, the home of the country’s recently retired Archbishop Godfried Danneels and even the crypt of a prelate — a violation the Vatican decried at the time as “deplorable.”

Danneels, a longtime friend of Francis, was caught on tape trying to persuade 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 being molested by priests, including when they were as young as two. 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 a four-episode Flemish documentary, “Godvergeten” (Godforsaken) aired on public broadcaster VRT in the weeks surrounding the royal visit to the Vatican.

For the first time, Belgian victims told their stories on camera one after another, showing Flemish viewers in their living rooms the scope of the scandal in their community, the depravity of the crimes and their systematic cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy.

“We brought nothing new. We just put it all together. We brought the voices together,” said Ingrid Schildermans, the researcher and filmmaker behind Godvergeten. “We put all the things that happened on a timeline, so that they couldn't say ‘It’s one rotten apple.’”

“That was the thing that the documentary made clear, like this really is a system and there are really people who look away or people don’t care,” she said in an interview.

Amid the public outrage that ensued, both a Flanders parliamentary committee and Belgium’s federal parliament opened official inquests and heard months of testimony from victims, experts and the Catholic hierarchy.

Their testimonies cast new attention on a scandal that had already been blamed for the steep decline in the Catholic Church over a generation in Belgium, where church authorities don't even publish statistics of weekly Mass attendance because the monthly rate is already in the single digits.

By March, with a papal visit already announced, Francis finally took action and defrocked Vangheluwe, 14 years after he admitted to molesting his nephew. The laicization was seen as a clear bid by the Vatican to tamp down the outrage and remove an obvious problem clouding Francis' visit.

The parliamentary inquiries wrapped up in May, before the country’s elections. But one issue remained outstanding: What ever became of Operation Chalice, the much-touted police raids on Danneels' residence and other church offices in 2010.

Hundreds of boxes of documents that police seized were ordered returned to the church in 2014, and the criminal investigation essentially shelved, according to victims' lawyers Christine Mussche and Walter Van Steenbrugge. They have denounced what they call a “hallucinatory sequence of irregularities and illegalities (that) has decapitated the investigation and deprived survivors of clerical sexual abuse of their fundamental right to a fair trial.”

The parliamentary inquest, as part of its mandate, had been looking into the “possible dysfunctions" in the criminal investigation and specifically whether there was “any political, financial, national or foreign interventions, instigation, pressure and influence,” on the failed case.

Because the investigation didn’t conclude before new elections, a follow-on investigation was announced Tuesday looking into “Operation Chalice.”

All of which has left a rather bitter taste among the Belgian public ahead of Francis' visit, not least because Francis remained tight with Danneels even after his cover-up was exposed, and again showed ignorance of Belgium's problem when he named the retired bishop of Ghent a cardinal in 2022. The bishop declined the honor because of his poor record dealing with abuse.

The visit has also in some cases retraumatized victims, some of whom had sought to meet with the pope only to be told by church authorities they didn't make the cut, said Schildermans.

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

It's a far different atmosphere than the rapturous welcome Francis received in Asia less than two weeks ago and far removed from the excitement that surrounded St. John Paul II when he toured Belgium in 1985.

Even De Standaard, one of Belgium’s main dailies which long was seen as the most Catholic, had a big weekend takeout under the headline “How revolutionary is Pope Francis really?” The dead giveaway: Not really.

Tuesday brought further evidence of how Belgium's dreadful record of abuse, cover-up and insensitivity to victims had clouded Francis' visit.

Bishop Patrick Hoogmartens of northern Limburg announced he wouldn't take part in celebratory papal events, after revelations that he had just warmly eulogized a priest who was known to have been involved in an abuse case.

“I didn’t make the assessment that it would hurt an abuse victim from the 1970s,” he told TV Limburg.

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Casert reported from Brussels.

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