BELGIUM
Reuters
(Reuters) – Belgium’s senior Roman Catholic cleric, Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, has been ordered to pay 10,000 euros ($10,900) in damages for failing to act on allegations of sexual abuse in the 1990s.
The civil case was brought by Joel Devillet, who was abused by a priest while he was a choirboy in the south of Belgium in the late 1980s, when he was 14 years old.
Devillet later studied to become a priest himself and informed the Church of his earlier experience of abuse, but it did little to help him and did not alert justice authorities, an appeals court in Liege said on Thursday.
“At no moment at the church court was Joel Devillet recognised as a victim,” the court said in its judgment, adding that Leonard, in his capacity as bishop of Namur in the 1990s, bore some blame.
“The way in which Bishop Leonard treated the case of Joel Devillet constituted misconduct,” the court said.
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