Former Belgian Catholic leader Danneels says not responsible for abuse
Belgium’s former top Roman Catholic bishop told a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday into the sexual abuse of children by clerics that he was not responsible for other Belgian bishops.
Belgium’s lower house set up the inquiry to examine an issue that has rocked the Catholic Church worldwide and resulted in hundreds of victims coming forward. Widespread sexual abuse of minors by Belgian clerics drove at least 13 victims to suicide, a Church commission said in September, recording 475 cases.
Tape recordings released in Belgium this summer made it clear that Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who until January was archbishop of Brussels and head of the Belgian bishops’ conference, was aware of abuse by Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe but had discouraged immediate public statements by the victim.
“I cannot give orders to other bishops. I have no legal authority over other bishoprics and I think that is at the base of a lot of the problems that have been mentioned here,” Danneels told the inquiry on Tuesday. He denied any effort to hush up cases of abuse.
Some MPs were disappointed with his four-hour testimony. “Cardinal Danneels missed an opportunity to improve his image,” said Green deputy Stefaan Van Hecke.
Confusion reigns as Belgium struggles with Catholic sex abuse scandal
Following the crisis of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Belgium is like watching a rudderless ship in a storm. The Church hierarchy seems overwhelmed by the scandal that has engulfed it. The state seems unable to intervene after its spectacular raid on Church offices last June backfired on it. Left hanging are at least 475 victims who have no idea what to expect next.
The latest installment in this confusing drama came on Tuesday when Bishop Guy Harpigny, the bishops’ conference spokesman for abuse issues, confessed in two morning radio interviews that the Church botched a news conference on Monday by not issuing a full apology to victims. But — as my colleague Phil Blenkinsop reported in our story today — he admitted it was afraid to do so because that could bring on a wave of compensation demands.
“If we say ‘mea culpa,’ then we are morally responsible, legally responsible, and then people come wanting money. We don’t know what the lawyers and the courts will do with that,” he told the Flemish-language Radio 1. “We are afraid. Who will ask — the victims, the courts or someone else? That’s why we are so careful.” A bit later in the interview, he admitted: “The news conference yesterday was a missed chance for a ‘mea culpa’. Maybe the church was too concerned with itself.”
The news conference on Monday was supposed to be the Church’s response to a report issued last Friday by its own commission for sexual abuse claims. That report was a damning indictment of the Belgian Church, where it said sexual abuse of minors was widespread in the 1960s and 1970s and little was done when cases were brought to the attention of the hierarchy.
“Silence is a sickness in society as a whole,” Peter Adriaenssens, the head of a Church commission monitoring complaints, said as he presented the report to the media. “Almost every institution, every school, particularly boarding schools, at one time harboured abuse.”
More than half of the 200-page report consists of excerpts of testimony from victims. “In the case of 13 of the victims, it was reported that they committed suicide and this was related to sexual abuse by a priest,” it said. The 475 cases it recorded included victims as young as two. Two-thirds were male and boys aged about 12 were particularly vulnerable. In most cases, abuse tailed off when victims reached 15 or 16. Adriaenssens said: “With these testimonies, it was not about superficial handling. It was about oral and anal abuse, forced and mutual masturbation. In other words, it was about people who had experienced serious acts.”
The Church’s response on Monday was even less than the standard bureaucratic reflex of setting up a committee to study a problem. At a news conference, it announced a plan to set up a support and reconciliation centre for victims, but it wouldn’t open until around Christmas. The three bishops involved — Brussels Archbishop André-Joseph Leonard, Johan Bonny of Antwerp and Harpigny — spoke about listening to victims, setting new rules for priests and creating new relationships between victims, therapists, the Church and judicial authorities. But there were few details, leaving the impression that the exercise were more about buying time than taking decisive steps to tackle the crisis.
Posted today: 10 Percent of Catholic priests were pedophiles at City of Angels Blog: http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/0 9/new-stats-10-percent-of-catholic.html Written by a journalist who is also a victim of this crime. The number of pedophile priests in the USA extrapolated by Bishop Accountability using recently released diocese Documents, in the USA is 10,969. And still counting.
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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The roman catholic church is the most evil, most corrupt, most dishonest, most perverted and most inferior of all the Christian churches in the world.