Belgian commission on abuse resigns
“The entire committee is going to resign,” one of its members, Karlijn Demasure, told television cameras following a meeting of the body set up in 2000 to investigate paedophilia within the Church.
A theology professor at the Saint Paul University of Ottawa, Canada, Demasure, said that “trust between victims and the commission” and between “the commission and the judicial authorities” was now “broken” and that it was no longer possible to go on.
“We are pulling out. The debate must now take place between victims, political leaders, the judiciary, the Church and public opinion,” said commission head Peter Andriaenssens, who announced last Thursday that police had seized hundreds of files and claimed a breach of confidentiality.
Adriaenssens, a child psychiatrist who chaired the panel, said Belgian authorities betrayed the trust of nearly 500 victims who had made complaints over the past two months to the Church panel and blamed state prosecutors for pursuing victims too traumatised to speak to police.
“We were bait,” he said.
Demasure said that Andriaenssens had stood down in the morning, and the rest of the committee decided to follow suit.
Thursday’s raids were prompted by new claims of child abuse by members of the Catholic Church in Belgium, one of the countries worst hit by recent revelations of clerical paedophilia.
Police confiscated phones, computers and the archdiocese’s accounting system in a search for documents, including any correspondence between alleged victims and the Catholic authorities.
Pope Benedict XVI said the raids deployed “deplorable methods” while his number two, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said the “sequestration” of a number of bishops while they were carried out was unprecedented even under communist regimes.
They also seized computer files at the home of Godfried Danneels, who was Belgium’s top cardinal for the past 20 years. Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard is his successor.
Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera said Belgian authorities acted out of frustration with the Church, which under a 1990s agreement was supposed to refer abuse cases to prosecutors.
The Belgian Church was rocked in April when its longest-serving bishop, 73-year-old Roger Vanghel- uwe, resigned after admitting sexually abusing a boy for years.
