BRUSSELS – On a brutal day for the frail and aging Pope Francis, the king of Belgium, its prime minister and the rector of the Catholic university that invited him here all ripped into the institution he heads for a spectrum of sins: for covering up cases of clergy sex abuse and being far behind the times on embracing women and the LGBTQ+ community in the church.
And that was all before Francis met with the people most harmed by the Catholic Church in Belgium — the men and women who were raped and molested by priests as children and the single mothers who were forced to give up their newborns for adoption to avoid the stigma of raising them out of wedlock.
Through it all, Francis expressed his remorse, begged forgiveness and promised to do everything possible to make sure such abuses never occur again. “This is our shame and humiliation,” he said in his first public remarks on Belgian soil.
Francis has visited countries with wretched legacies of church wrongdoing before. He made a sweeping apology to Irish abuse survivors in 2018 and traveled to Canada in 2022 to atone for the church-run residential schools that traumatized generations of Indigenous peoples.
But it is hard to think of a single day where the leader of the 1.3-billion strong Catholic Church had been subjected to such strong, public criticisms from a country’s highest institutional figures — royalty, government and academia — over the church’s crimes and its seemingly tone deaf responses to the demands of today’s Catholics.
Luc Sels, the rector of Leuven Catholic University, the 600th anniversary of which 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, to the point of ordaining women as priests, if it wants to regain its relevance.
“Why do we tolerate the major differences between men and women in a church that, de facto, depends so heavily on women?” Sels asked the pope. “Wouldn’t the church be a warmer place if women were given a prominent place, the most prominent place, also in priesthood?”
“Wouldn’t the church in our region gain moral authority if it were not so rigid in its approach to gender and diversity issues? And if it did, like the university does, open its arms more to the LGBTQ+ community?” he asked.
The comments certainly reflected the views of Belgium and more progressive European society. But they also reflected the reform-minded church in this part of the world that Francis has embraced, to a degree, in seeking to make the universal church more relevant and responsive to Catholics today.
The day began with King Philippe welcoming Francis to Laeken Castle, the residence of Belgium’s royal family, and citing the abuse and forced adoption scandals in demanding the church work “incessantly” to atone for the crimes and help victims heal.
He was followed by Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who was also allowed to speak in an exception to typical Vatican protocol. He used the opportunity of a face-to-face public encounter to demand “concrete steps” to come clean with the full extent of the abuse scandal and put victims’ interests over those of the church.
“Victims need to be heard. They need to be at the center. They have a right to truth. Misdeeds need to be recognized,” he told the pope. “When something goes wrong we cannot accept cover-ups,” he said. “To be able to look into the future, the church needs to come clean on its past.”
It was one of the most pointed welcome speeches ever directed at the pope during a foreign trip, where the genteel dictates of diplomatic protocol usually keep outrage out of public remarks.
But the tone underscored just how raw the abuse scandal still is in Belgium, where two decades of revelations of abuse and systematic cover-ups have devastated the hierarchy’s credibility and contributed to an overall decline in Catholicism and the influence of the once-powerful church.
Francis read along a translation of De Croo’s Dutch remarks and clapped at the end.
Overall, victims welcomed the words from both church and state. Survivor Emmanuel Henckens said that “to an extent they went to the crux of the evil. He said it was no longer possible to look the other way.”
But another abuse survivor, Koen Van Sumere, said it was now essential for the church to move beyond mere words and provide victims with substantial reparations. It was a reference to their call for Francis to establish a universal church system of reparations, something the Vatican would be loath to entertain since it has long insisted local churches handle any financial settlements with victims.
“If you want to move toward forgiveness and reconciliation it is not sufficient to only say ‘I am sorry’ but you have to bear the consequences it entails and you should compensate the damages,” Van Sumere said. He said so far what the Belgian church had paid out ”amounted to alms” and that the settlement he received for his abuse didn’t even cover the costs of his therapy.
Revelations of Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal have dribbled out in bits over a quarter-century, punctuated by a bombshell in 2010 when the country’s longest-serving bishop, Brugge Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, was allowed to resign without punishment after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew for 13 years.
Francis only defrocked Vangheluwe earlier this year, in a move clearly designed to remove a lingering source of outrage among Belgians before his visit.
In September 2010, the church released a 200-page report that said 507 people had come forward with stories of being molested by priests, including when they were as young as 2. It identified at least 13 suicides by victims and attempts by six more.
Victims and advocates say those findings were just the tip of the iceberg and that the true scope of the scandal is far greater.
In his remarks, Francis insisted that the church was “addressing firmly and decisively” the abuse problem by implementing prevention programs, listening to victims and accompanying them to heal.
But after the astonishing dressing-down by the prime minister and king, Francis went off-script to express the shame of the church for the scandal and 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,” Francis said. “But even if it were only one (victim), it is enough to be ashamed.”
The prime minister, king and pope also referred to a new church-related scandal rocking Belgium, over so-called “forced adoptions,” which echoed earlier revelations about Ireland’s so-called mother and baby homes.
After World War II and through to the 1980s, many single mothers were forced by the Belgian church to offer their newborns up for adoption, with money changing hands. For those adopted, it’s nearly impossible to find their birth mothers now, since the records have long ago disappeared.
Francis said he was “saddened” to learn of these practices, but said such criminality was “mixed in with what was unfortunately the prevailing view in all parts of society at this time.”
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