THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD
Belgian Church afraid to apologise for abuse
Tom Heneghan In Paris
THE BELGIANChurch has avoided giving a full apology for child sexual abuse by clergy because it is worried that asking for pardon would open it to a wave of compensation claims from victims, the bishops’ conference spokesman on abuse issues has said. “If we say mea culpa, then we are morally respon- sible, legally responsible and then people come wanting money,” Bishop Guy Harpigny of Tournai told Belgian radio. “We are afraid. Who will ask –the victims, the court or some- one else? That’s why we are so careful.” The church commission probing 475 com- plaints revealed in its report last Friday that sexual abuse was widespread in Catholic insti- tutions in the 1960s and 1970s and led 13 victims to commit suicide. At a press confer- ence on Monday following the release of the commission’s report, the Church announced that it would create a support and reconcil- iation centre for clerical sexual abuse victims. But it gave few details and said it would not open until Christmas, leading critics to charge the hierarchy with stalling and that it should hand over all its files to judicial author- ities to investigate and prosecute if necessary. Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, pres- ident of the Belgian bishops’ conference, pledged the Church’s “maximum availability” for victims. The proposed centre would coor- dinate work better among victims, the Church and justice authorities, the Bishop of Antwerp,
Johan Bonny, said at Monday’s news confer- ence. Bishop Harpigny said on Tuesday that the Belgian Church had missed a chance to take a clear stand against abuse at the con- ference on Monday. Asked about an apology, the bishop told Belgium’s Radio 1: “The news conference yesterday was a missed chance for a mea culpa. Maybe the Church was too concerned with itself.”
Amid the confusion, calls have grown for former Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who resigned in April after admitting to abus- ing his own nephew, to be reduced to lay status. Bishop Harpigny has suggested Vangheluwe should be tried in an ecclesial court, but Archbishop Léonard told journalists the disgraced bishop’s fate was a question for the Vatican. Since he is a bishop, any decision about him has to come from the Pope. Vangheluwe announced on 11 September that he would leave a Trappist monastery in the Bruges Diocese and go into hiding to think about his future. Peter Adriaenssens, chairman of the abuse commission whose files were seized by police in June, presented his final 200-page report on 10 September, saying it was the Church’s “Dutroux report” – a reference to the case of a 1990s serial killer that judicial authorities badly mismanaged. The 475 cases the commission studied showed that abuse peaked in the 1960s, when it seemed to take place in almost every diocese and every Catholic boarding school, and fell sharply in the 1980s. Two-thirds of the victims
Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard pledged the Church’s ‘maximum availability’ to victims.
Photo: CNS
were male, one-third female, and boys around 12 were the most vulnerable. Most abuse ended by the time the victims reached 16. “With these testimonies, it was not about
superficial handling,” Mr Adriaenssens said. “It was about oral and anal abuse, forced and mutual masturbation. In other words, it was about people who had experienced serious acts.” Mr Adriaenssens said the commission found no evidence of a systematic church effort to hush up abuse, but did find cases where nothing was done about it. A 17-year- old girl raped by a priest was told by her bishop to “stop looking at him and he’ll leave you alone”. The commission head said victims could sue the Church for not protecting people in danger and demand compensation. At his news conference on Monday, Archbishop Léonard said the Church would cooperate loyally with the state, adding that abusive priests could be defrocked under canon law. He also said sexual abuse was a question for all of Belgian society and called for “a wider social approach to the problem”.
Pope wants new drive to bring back the faithful in Brazil
POPE BENEDICT XVIhas urged Brazil’s bish- ops to urgently undertake a new evangelisation aimed at stopping Catholics from abandoning their Church and joining the fast-growing evangelical and neo-Pentecostal communities, writes Robert Mickens. In a message on 10 September to bishops from north-eastern Brazil, the Pope said the expansion of these “new groups that call them- selves followers of Christ” was due, in part, to the “superficial” way the Catholic Church has passed on the faith. On the other hand, he said the rapid growth of the Bible-based communities was also a clear sign that there was a “widespread thirst for God” in Brazil. Reminding the bishops that Catholic mis- sionaries were the first to bring Christian faith
38 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010
to their country five centuries ago, Pope Benedict insisted that Catholicism was still “fundamental to the identity of the Brazilian people”. But he blamed the “growing influence of new elements in society that were practically foreign a few decades ago” for lead- ing Catholics to abandon the Church and join other Christian communities. The Pope urged the Brazilian church leaders to respond to the situation by “sparing no effort” to reach out to fallen-away Catholics and to those who “know little or nothing” about the Gospel message. At the same time he said they had to “make a commitment to building bridges in order to establish contacts through a healthy ecumenical dialogue in truth”. However, he said, the “growing negative
influence of intellectual and moral relativism” among their people posed “not a few obstacles” to ecumenism. “One must reject an erroneous view of ecumenism that attempts to level out, through an a-critical irenicism, all ‘opinions’ into a sort of ecclesiological relativism,” he said. Catholic leaders had to meet the chal- lenge of “aggressive proselytism” that some of the new groups employed. Meanwhile, on Saturday the Pope told some 100 missionary bishops ordained within the last year not to give in to “pessimism or dis- couragement” because of the tiny presence of Catholics in their countries. He said the Holy Spirit guided the Church and would give it “courage to persevere and also to seek new methods of evangelisation”.
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