Belgium urges Vatican to impose harsh punishment on sex abuse bishop
Belgium’s justice minister urged the Vatican on Friday to impose stiff punishment on a disgraced Catholic bishop who denies being a paedophile despite admitting to sexually abusing two of his own nephews. Stefaan de Clerck spoke out amid a media uproar after former Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe defended himself on television by saying the abuse he committed was only “superficial.”
Vangheluwe, who quit his post and went into hiding a year ago after admitting to molesting a nephew, confessed in the interview on Thursday evening that he had molested a second one. He left Belgium last week under Vatican orders to seek “spiritual and psychological treatment” abroad and Belgian media say he is now in a French monastery. The Vatican has said the final decision on disciplining him lies with Pope Benedict.
“The Church must take up this case and see what sanction it should impose. It should be much more severe and much more complete than what has been said up until now,” De Clerck, a Christian Democrat, told RTL radio. “We expect the Church to punish him,” he said. “They told him to leave the country — that was also to shut him up. Making comments trying to minimise what happened is unacceptable.”
The Vatican has been reluctant to impose stiff punishments on bishops found guilty of covering up sexual abuse of youths by priests under their authority. Three bishops in Ireland and one in Germany have resigned but others accused of mismanagement have held onto their jobs.
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Belgian Church moves on abuse but victims still unhappy
Belgium’s Catholic Church responded to an abuse scandal with plans to create a reconciliation centre and set new rules for priests, but victim groups called the moves insufficient. “The past months have been very difficult for the Church and for us. We are fully committed to tackling this problem in a new way,” Archbishop André-Joseph Leonard told a news conference. “It causes us pain. Coming out of such a crisis is not easy.”
The scandal erupted in April when the Bishop of Bruges resigned after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew. A commission monitoring abuse last week released a report saying clerical abuse was widespread in Belgium. Critics accuse the Church of not acting against errant priests and turning a blind eye to abuse. The commission said it found no evidence that the Church had systematically covered up crimes, although had found instances where nothing was done.
The centre for recognition, healing and reconciliation for victims will possibly be set up by the end of the year.
Walter Van Steenbrugge, a lawyer representing about 30 victims, told Belgian television the Church should be ready to pay compensation and leave cases to the justice authorities.
Read the full story here. The Word document with the Church statement is here in French. The news conference with Archbishop Leonard is here in French on RTBF television.
Belgian Cardinal Danneels admits making mistakes in sex abuse case
The former head of Belgium’s Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has admitted he made mistakes in dealing with a case of sexual abuse and should have demanded the resignation of the bishop involved.
In interviews published in the newspapers Het Laatste Nieuws and La Libre Belgique and the weekly magazine Knack on Wednesday, he described his failure to urge former Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe to go as his “most serious error of judgement.”
Vangheluwe resigned at the end of April after admitting he had sexually abused a nephew, the first such known case of high-level abuse in the Catholic church in Belgium. However, Danneels suggested to the victim during a meeting earlier in April that it would be better to keep quiet, with the bishop due to retire in 2011, according to transcripts of the meeting published last month.
Danneels said in Wednesday’s interview that he had tried to establish why the family had kept quiet for almost 25 years and had never been to the police, and he denied mentioning the bishop’s impending retirement to influence the relatives.
“I never wanted to suggest that it should not be made public,” Danneels said. “Up until today I have the feeling that I had stepped into a trap. Call it naivete. You can make all sorts of assumptions about the intentions of Roger Vangheluwe. But the error of assessment was mine.”
This information can interest your lectorate
RAID IN MECHELEN ARCHDIOCESE ILLEGAL
Today, September 9, the Court of Appeals of Brussels has rendered a judgment with respect to the police raid in the St. Rumbold’s Cathedral and the archdiocese of Mechelen – Brussels. The Court held that the spectacular seizures on June 24 in the offices of the Archdiocese and the residence of former archbishop Cardinal Godfried Danneels in Mechelen were irregular, and therefor illegal, that all documents and objects seized should be returned and that all acts based on material that was illegally seized should be declared null and void. The Court considered that the investigators acted without possessing specific indications of a violation of criminal law by the Archdiocese or Cardinal Danneels and in fact carried out an illegitimate and illegal fishing expedition.
Mgr. André – Joseph Léonard, the archbishop of Mechlin, hopes this verdict will allow the Belgian Church to direct its full attention to those who have been victims of sexual abuse in a pastoral relationship and who deserve proper recognition and support.
The Belgian Bishops deeply regret the substantial and partially irreparable damage incurred as a result of the illegal actions of some in the justice system. The raids and seizures have breached the confidence of victims of sexual abuse and tarnished the reputation of both the Church and the Belgian justice system.
The Church welcomes and fully supports the judicial investigation and prosecution of child abusers. Such investigations should however always be focused and carried out in a correct legal manner, which, as the Court now confirmed, has not been the case up to present.
By vigorously insisting that brutal force should not replace the principles of law, the Church is not attempting to prevent an investigation, but is contributing to the preservation of fundamental principles which exist to protect those in a position of weakness.
The Bishops hope that the judgment of the Court of Appeals will help to restore confidence among all parties in this matter.
Leaked Danneels tapes with Catholic sex abuse victim make for sad reading
“Why do you feel so sorry for him and not for me?” — Victim of sexual abuse by a Belgian bishop to Cardinal Godfried Danneels.
The transcripts of two meetings between Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels and a man sexually abused by the disgraced former bishop of Bruges make for sad reading indeed. Two Flemish-language newspapers, De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad, published the texts on Saturday after the victim provided them with his secret recordings of the sessions. My analysis of the case is here.
Apart from the exchanges they reveal, the transcripts are sobering because of the context of the meeting. It took place on April 8, at a time when the series of clerical sexual abuse revelations that began in Ireland the previous year was tearing through Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria like a tornado. Pope Benedict had issued an unprecedented apology to the Irish for the scandals only shortly before. Church leaders all over were vowing to end the Church’s culture of secrecy and put the victims’ welfare above the defence of the clergy. If there was any time to simply say, “OK, he has to go. We have to report this,” this was it.
It’s a sad end for the career of a leading Catholic cardinal, a grandfatherly man who spent 30 years as primate of the Belgian Church and stepped down last January amid wide popular support (except from conservatives who denounced him as too liberal).
There’s also an almost comic side to this story. When Belgian police swooped down on Church offices and Danneels’s apartment in late June to seize files and computers for abuse records, they also searched two tombs of deceased archbishops in the Mechelen cathedral crypt because someone suggested the cardinal had hidden some incriminating documents down there. They found nothing but the previous primates’ remains. Little did they know a real bombshell was elsewhere, on the tape the bishop’s victim had made.
In the published transcripts of that meeting, the unnamed victim, now 42, told Danneels he could no longer keep quiet about how his uncle, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, sexually abused him between the ages of 5 and 18. He says Vangheluwe could not remain in office and the case must be reported to the Church hierarchy, but he doesn’t know how to do this.
These Vatican guys never stop. Reminds me of the Mafia, the way they’re so loyal to each other, covering up for them. God bless that victim for taping his conversation. They would have called him a liar without it. Nice, noble Catholic leaders that they are. Now, we’ve got to get the rapist behind bars. What’s this trappist monastery thing all about? What makes this rapist think he can call the shots and determine where he spends the rest of his miserable life?? The arrogance of these pretenders is sickening. Time for prison, little uncle.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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This statement that a Catholic cannot prosecute a case against the pope is religious bigotry pure and simple.
As Dr. Mc Hugh–a professional blogger of hate against the church can attest–Catholics can be fair minded about their church even hate their own church as she clearly does.
Can you imagine saying that blacks cannot be seated on juries in which black criminal defendants are charged? But here since her bigotry is directed against the Catholic church it is tolerated as anti-Catholicism is the bigotry of the left intelligentsia.