Seminar Photos
Questions for the Cardinal
The resignation of the Bishop of Bruges after he admitted abusing a young boy unleashed a chain of events culminating in a police raid in Brussels. The scandal surrounding allegations of clerical abuse now threatens to engulf Cardinal Denneels.
by Tom Heneghan
Belgium’s bishops met on Thursday 24 June, and there was no reason to think that the monthly meeting would be different from any other.
They had gathered at the Archbishop’s Palace in Mechelen, just outside Brussels, and were settling down to business when a team of police officers arrived.
The police said they were authorised to search the premises as part of an investigation into sexual abuse by priests of the diocese. The bishops and the diocesan staff had to stay where they were for nine hours, their mobile phones confiscated, while inspectors searched the offices and took away a computer. At the same time, other police raided the nearby flat of Cardinal Godfried Danneels and seized his computer. A third team searched the Leuven offices of the Church’s commission of inquiry into child abuse. In a bizarre move, officers even visited the crypt of St Rumbold’s Cathedral in Mechelen. A church spokesman said they drilled into the tombs of two archbishops, Cardinals Leo Jozef Suenens and Jozef-Ernest van Roey, and inserted a tiny camera to search inside. The Brussels prosecutor’s office disputes this, saying that only one tomb was disturbed.
The police raids highlight the growing tension between Church and State in Belgium that has emerged since the Bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, resigned in April after admitting sexually abusing his nephew.
Another consequence of Vangheluwe’s resignation was an increase in calls to the Belgian Church’s abuse hotline. By last week the commission on child abuse had built up 475 dossiers or cases – all of which were seized in the police raids. Bishop Vangheluwe’s disgrace also threatens the reputation of Cardinal Danneels, until recently a much-loved figure who was Archbishop of Brussels-Mechelen for more than 30 years until his retirement last January. Did he know anything about his friend’s crimes and if he did, was he aware that other diocesan priests had also abused children? Conflicting answers have been given to these questions.
The Belgian media believe the cardinal was involved in a cover-up. “The Danneels Code,” the Brussels daily De Standaard headlined one front page alongside a picture of the cardinal. An article was entitled “Searching for Danneels’ hiding places."
Cardinal Danneels said after Bishop Vangheluwe’s resignation that he had only learned about the case shortly before it became public. Asked about this after the raids, Danneels’ successor, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, said he had no reason to doubt what his predecessor had said.
But a retired priest, Rik Devillé, and Godelieve Halsberghe, who headed the Church’s abuse commission from 1998 to 2008, have both told Belgian media that they informed the cardinal of abuse cases years ago and got either a vague response or none at all. Reports said both men had recently passed documents on abuse cases to the police.
Devillé said he informed Danneels of Vangheluwe’s abuse as long ago as 1993. “I don’t know what he did afterwards,” he told the Milan daily La Stampa last weekend. “On one occasion, however, I remember the cardinal became angry. He said this wasn’t my job and I should stay out of it.” Danneels has said he had no recollection of receiving any such information.
More questions for Danneels are expected to follow from scrutiny of the 475 dossiers collected by the abuse commission. At a news conference after the police raids, the current commission head, Peter Adriaenssens, said that about 50 of them contained references to Danneels being somehow aware of the allegations in question.
“Can the cardinal be accused of neglect?” De Standaard asked. “There’s no hard proof right now, but almost nobody believes that Danneels knew nothing all these years.” It is not clear why the investigating magistrate following the sexual-abuse cases chose to hold the raids on 24 June. However, what is apparent is the state authorities’ dissatisfaction with the way the Church’s abuse commission was going about its work.
Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck said the authorities felt they had to intervene because the Church was treating the abuse issue as an internal administrative problem. But the Vangheluwe case, and the wave of complaints made to the commission since, had show that more was at stake. “They have the right to organise a commission and meet with victims.
But when it becomes a judicial matter, it has to go to the Justice Ministry,” he said. “This commission was taking its time, maybe too much time, to get organised.”
Cédric Visart de Bocarmé, public prosecutor in Liège, said the commission’s mistake was to think it could decide how to handle the complaints made to it. “If they decide not to give some dossiers to the court, they run the risk that an investigating magistrate orders them to be collected. This is what happened here.”
Adriaenssens, who is also a child psychologist at the Catholic University of Leuven, strongly defended the commission’s approach, claiming its promise of confidentiality to victims had been key to them coming forward. The commission had advised all victims whose cases fell within the statute of limitations to report to the police, Adriaenssens said. It only dealt with older cases and many of those victims wanted their testimony to stay confidential. “Who will now get to read that they were abused as a child?” he said.
The commission had been following up complaints with meetings between victims and predator priests or their superiors and planned to make an initial report in October. It had recently informed the justice authorities that the number of new complaints had dropped off. “It was then that they raided us,” Adriaenssens said. “Maybe our transparency was our undoing.”
With neither files nor a computer to work with, Adriaenssens threw in the towel on Monday and disbanded the commission. “They have literally emptied us out and taken the ground from under our feet,” he said. “We simply served as bait. They should only have done that if they thought we would commit fraud or hide things. But I made a point of saying we would work in full transparency.”
The prosecutor’s office has said it will need several weeks to comb through the seized documents. Given all the information the authorities now have, it seems likely they will want to hear more from Cardinal Danneels about what he knew and what he did about it.
■Tom Heneghan is religion editor for Reuters.