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Europe|Pope Francis, Visiting Belgium, Is Met With Anger Over Clerical Sexual Abuse
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/world/europe/pope-francis-belgium-sex-abuse.html
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During a trip to Luxembourg and Belgium, Francis will spend an hour meeting with 15 people who were abused by Roman Catholic clergy. Survivors say it is not enough.
Sept. 27, 2024, 5:20 a.m. ET
Pope Francis was due to meet on Friday with 15 people who were sexually abused by members of the clergy in Belgium, a largely Roman Catholic country where the church has been plagued by a history of scandal.
Unlike his trip to the Asia Pacific region two weeks ago, when adoring crowds and lively Catholic communities welcomed Francis, the pope’s three-day visit to Belgium has stirred anger and criticism over the church’s response to sexual abuse by priests.
“One hour for 15 people? It’s not really listening,” said Marc De Bosscher, 63, who was sexually abused by a priest in his church outside Brussels in the 1970s, when he was 11 and 12. “It’s some window dressing.”
Many accounts of clerical sexual abuse in Belgium have emerged over recent decades, and the issue exploded in 2010 when the then-bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, admitted having sexually abused his nephew for over a decade. The police started an investigation. More than a decade later, however, no one has been charged. The bishop was allowed to resign without punishment, and Francis defrocked him only this year. In the meantime, hundreds of other cases of clerical abuse and Church inaction have surfaced.
One man who is due to meet with the pope on Friday said in an interview on Thursday that during his time as a student at a Catholic school in Flanders, he and many other children at the school were raped by priests, or by other students who had themselves been raped by priests.
The scale of the sexual abuse was widely known by the school’s leadership, said the man, now 57, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the subject, adding that once a monk even walked in on him being raped and did not intervene.
