The victim, now 42, was abused by Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, 73, who is also the victim's uncle. Cardinal Godfried Danneels urged the victim to keep silent so that his uncle could retire gracefully.
What's more, this didn't happen twenty years ago, but rather on April 8 this year, after Danneels had himself retired as archbishop of Brussels.
“The bishop will resign next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait,” the cardinal told the victim. “I don’t think you’d do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.” The cardinal warned the victim against trying to blackmail the church and suggested that he accept a private apology from the bishop and not drag “his name through the mud.”
The victim responded, “He has dragged my whole life through the mud, from 5 until 18 years old,” and asked, “Why do you feel sorry for him and not for me?”
Why indeed? The Catholic Church could have saved itself a lot of grief if it had understood the import of that sentence: "Why do you feel sorry for him and not for me?"
People understand that a certain small percentage of priests might be criminals. In any group of 100,000 or so--and there are many more priests worldwide than that--there are bound to be at least a few whose interests and proclivities are two or more standard deviations from the mean. People understand that.
What they don't understand is that, after being made aware of the problem, the church largely responded by circling the wagons and protecting the insiders--which, as Cardinal Danneels demonstrates, they're still doing.
The victim tried to get the church's attention for many years. Finally, he tape recorded his meetings with church officials, including the meeting with Danneels on April 8. It was this case, and others, that prompted Belgian police to raid church headquarters in Belgium and seize documents. (The raid was criticized by the Vatican. Pope Benedict called it "deplorable.")
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