Belgium sets the Vatican straight
Belgium isn’t having it. Very good.
Belgium and the Vatican are on a collision course after the Holy See accused the Belgian police of using communist tactics in their paedophilia raids on Catholic bishops last week…
The Belgian Foreign Minister, Steven Vanackere, underlined the Belgian judiciary’s independence from the Church and its freedom to investigate.
“It’s good to [keep in mind] very important principles of the state of law. [There are] very elementary principles of having a separation of powers and accepting that the judiciary has to do its work,” Mr Vanackere told RNW. “That’s crucial for every democratic state.”
And that’s all there is to it. The Belgian government is the right body to investigate crimes by priests; the church is not. The church has a vested interest, and we already know what that interest is: concealment, protection of its own reputation for holiness and all-over goodness, impunity.
That panel set up by the church doesn’t see things that way. But it’s out of luck.
Belgium insisted Monday in a dispute with the Vatican over credibility that Belgian law enforcement authorities — not the potentially biased Catholic Church — will investigate sexual abuse cases involving clergy.
A panel created by Belgian bishops 12 years ago to look into abuse cases disbanded on Monday, saying last week’s seizure of its 500 case files rendered its existence pointless. Its chief, Peter Adriaenssens, accused authorities of betraying the trust of hundreds of victims and using his group to tap into information and testimony from abuse victims.
The chief of a church-appointed panel accused the Belgian government of using the testimony of victims. What did Mr Adriaenssens plan to do with the testimony then? Put it in a vault? Seal it in amber? Lose it?
Belgium’s government doesn’t appear to be concerned about having pushed the panel to the sidelines, despite an outburst from the Vatican that Thursday’s police raid was an unprecedented intrusion into church affairs.
“I respect Peter Adriaenssens, but his commission was created by the Church,” Glenn Audenaert, head of Belgium’s judiciary police, said after last week’s police raids. “That commission cannot start a prosecution. Only the justice department can.”
That’s the way to tell them.
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Just more proof that I should emigrate to Belgium (added to top of list, just below Stella Artois).
Choosing the rule of law over the rule of the church is “commie tactics?
Why of course it is. In any decent country, of course the Catholic church outranks the state.
The irony is that if the church and other religious power mongers didn’t work so hard to eliminate competing popular cultural alternatives that are based on reason and compassion, the state wouldn’t have to get so forcefully involved in the first place.
Put it in a locked filing cabinet, stashed in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.
Unless this case is exceptional among Catholic abuse cases, I suspect the panel didn’t need any help being pointless.
Better hurry while there still is a Belgium.
Peter Adriaenssens has a point. He is not a figure head of the church, the commision never was, it came regularly in conflict with the church.
As far as I understand Mr Adriaenssens had an agreement with the council of prosecutors, that all case that came in his possestion that were still prosecutable would be handed over to the police. The commision would only work with cases that were too old for prosecusion which it would treat according to the victims wishes, which in most cases would be to get the church to somehow recognize that it treated the person wrongfully.
The panel created 12 years ago disbanded? They can’t have been too busy in those 12 years if they haven’t come up with anything tangible yet (except “we’re sorry for covering up”) … I’m Belgian and I wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of the Belgian police force’s wrath, especially in this sort of case. Belgians are very touchy about the subject of child abuse, what with the Dutroux case in 1996. The judicial system has a point to prove! That being said, the Catholic Church is no position to investigate these cases itself. Their credibility disappeared a long time ago… What does your apology mean if you don’t change your behaviour?
The panel has a history of conflict with the church. The previous chief resigned because the church didn’t cooperate enough. The panel was recently restarted with its new chief Mr Adriaenssens. There are two causes for this restart. 1) The scandals in the church in other countries. 2) The installment of a new arch bisshop in Belgium. If I am correctly informed it was this panel that was directly involved in getting bisshop van Gheluwe to step down for his abuse of children in the past and which as a consequence got the police involved.
The numbers are interesting: 500 cases, 12 years. Congratulations to the Belgian authorities anyway.
Axxyaan,
Even if the commission promised to turn over all prosecutable cases and did so, the civil authorities are entirely right to examine them, for several reasons
The civil government should not be privatizing law enforcement, period.
The civil government should especially not be privatizing law enforcement by delegating investigations to the organization being investigated. Having the fabled foxes guard the henhouse is bad strategy in general.
Worse, this is an organization that has demonstrated dishonesty about such matters, pretending to clean house while still prioritizing protecting its own image over exposing criminality.
Even if the panel did in fact turn over all criminally prosecutable cases of child abuse to the civil authorities—which we have excellent reason to doubt—the civil authorities should be examining all the cases, and looking for patterns. They should be diagnosing what went wrong, <i>especially</i> in cases where a crime was likely committed but criminal prosecution is <i>not</i> feasible.
For example, if there’s insufficient evidence in a case, <i>why</i> is there insufficient evidence? Was evidence destroyed? Was it never gathered when it obviously should have been?
Or if a case is not prosecutable because the statute of limitations has expired, how did that go down? Was there a conspiracy to mislead victims and their parents into thinking theirs were isolated cases, which they should keep mum about, only to find out later their cases were part of a pattern, when it was too late because the statute of limitations had run out. Was hush money paid precisely for the purpose of keeping enough people quiet that the Church could plausibly deny the criminality it was perpetuating, and that it was perpetuating that criminality by failing to exercise due diligence in policing itself?
It’s pretty obvious at this point that the Church engaged in a systematic pattern of criminal activity, including criminal coverups. It’s also clear that this conspiracy was worldwide and top-to-bottom—the current pope and his right-hand man were both involved. They may in fact have done a better job of policing this sort of thing than their predecessors, but they clearly fell short, as they have admitted.
The civil authorities have every reason to investigate this as they would investigate a pattern of criminality, coverups, and corruption in any other transnational corporation. The Catholic church and its current leaders have clearly demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to police themselves, and that it is exactly the civil authorities’ job to investigate not only particular cases of abuse, but the pattern of abuse, and especially the organizational corruption that perpetuated it.
Only in light of a clear understanding of the problems, and the full scope and extent of the problems, can the civil authorities make reasonable judgments as to how to prevent such things in the future.
The Catholic Church has clearly been behaving like a worldwide criminal enterprise in some ways. It is long past time to investigate the institutional corruption, as well as systematically reviewing the individual cases.
Axxyaan:
“The panel has a history of conflict with the church. The previous chief resigned because the church didn’t cooperate enough.”
I think that’s a really good reason for the civil authorities to investigate things thoroughly themselves.
The panel is clearly not independent of the Church. The previous chief resigned over lack of cooperation, rather than forcing cooperation by subpoenaing the relevant information, deposing hte relevant witnesses, and jailing those who obstruct justice by failing to cooperate.
The recent version of the panel may in fact have been more willing to probe deeper, and possibly expose more things to the civil authorities, but there’s every reason to think a coverup is still going on, and that such increased “cooperation” is just a matter of their having a slightly longer leash, because the pope knows the cat is out of the bag and that the Church must make a better show of cooperation.
We have no reason to expect such a panel to actually be truly independent, rather than ultimately limited by the Church hierarchy for the very same reasons they’ve always had.
The openness of the Catholic Church about criminal activitities and coverups should not be dependent on the Pope’s assessment of how much openness is required for PR purposes. That’s true in any case, but it should be dead obvious given the Pope’s obvious failure to prioritize exposing and preventing child rape over protecting the Church’s image for several decades.
Any panel whose chair resigns over his inability to demand cooperation, rather than demanding cooperation in accordance with civil law, is plainly insufficient to the task. It would be improper for the civil authorities not to step in and do it right.