National Post
April 15, 2011
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/04/15/vatican-fails-the-pedophile-response-test-again/
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| Belgium's Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe during an interview with Belgian television |
Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: While Pope Benedict frets about the words being used in the mass and muzzling an uppity American nun, legions of Roman Catholic clerical pedophiles are being allowed to get on with it.
What will it take for the Church to root out the priestly predators?
The case of Roger Vangheluwe, the former bishop of Bruges, is the latest dispiriting example of the Vatican’s failure to get the point. On Thursday, he admitted on television he had sexually abused two of his nephews, though he did his best to downplay the seriousness of his acts, insisting he was not a pedophile.
“It began as a kind of game with this boy,” said the 74-year-old. “It was never a question of rape, or physical violence. He never saw me naked and there was no penetration.”
“I don’t in the slightest have any sense I am a pedophile. I don’t get the impression my nephew was opposed, quite the contrary,” he added although he also admitted, “I knew it wasn’t good, I confessed it several times.”
No one in the family seemed very concerned, he claimed. Vangheluwe also admitted he gave one million Belgian francs to one of the boys, but not to pay him off, you understand. It was to enable him to buy a house.
The punishment for the most senior Catholic cleric to admit to abuse? — “spiritual and psychological treatment” at a cushy retreat in the Loire Valley in neighbouring France. And in a slap on the wrist with a wet noodle, he’s also been told he can no longer perform the duties of a priest in public.
Belgians — clerics and lay people alike — are “stupefied” by the latest revelations. Yves Leterme, the Belgian Prime Minister, said his remarks “go beyond the boundary of what is acceptable. “The Church must assume its responsibilities — this cannot go on.”
“I think it is astonishing how this man does not feel any guilt, does not show any guilt,” Christine Mussche, a lawyer for victims of sexual abuse, told The New York Times.
“He’s saying that the victims also enjoyed this and there is not feeling of regret at all. It is terrible for the victim — one year after this emerged — that he doesn’t feel any normal regret.”
That sentiment was echoed by Karine Lalieux, the Belgian legislator who recently led a parliamentary committee on sexual abuse. “I say it’s sickening, disgusting,” Ms. Lalieux said. “Mr. Vangheluwe has not understood that he has committed crimes, he has minimized and relativized his crimes. I think of the victims and of their suffering.”
Words like disgusting and appalling echo through the comments of Belgian media. “How can this man dare appear on television?” asks Paul Geudens in the Flemish newspaper the Antwerp Gazette, who says his hair stood on end listening to the ex-bishop.
“ ‘Here everything is fine. Love and kisses from sunny France,’ that’s the message we’re getting from Vangheluwe …
For the love of God, how can such a person ever have been a bishop? His place is not in an abbey in France, but in a cell in a psychiatric establisment.”
Writing in the French-language newspaper Le Soir, Jurek Kuczkiewicz wonders why the disgraced prelate was comfortably housed by the papal nuncio in Brussels before the Vatican announced its decision this week and hastily shipped him out of the country.
“As if the announcement of his punishment could obliterate the astonishing news that a pedophile was the nuncio’s guest while awaiting a ruling from Belgian and Vatican legal authorities … the temporary hosting of a ‘lost sheep’ must have posed serious logistical and moral problems for the Catholic Church.
But surely there was a more appropriate lodging in between leaving him homeless — quite contrary to Christian charity — and housing him in a comfortable embassy protected by diplomatic immunity? Perhaps the Church hoped in this way to keep him under control. But one can’t help thinking if the nuncio wants to take in the unfortunate, there are many more worthy people sleeping on the streets.”
compiled by Araminta Wordsworth awordsworth@nationalpost.com
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