Over the past few decades, numerous news stories and headlines have come out against the Catholic Church worldwide. Many of these stories revolve around sexual abuse scandals,specifically sexual abuse against minors. One country that has seen a surge in these scandals is Belgium.
The small country seated in the low countries of the northwest region of Europe has a strong Catholic population. However, its government has had to deal with an enormous number of scandals revolving around the Catholic Church. These have included cases of sexual abuse against minors and women, and it even a forced adoption case in the mid to late 90s where an estimated 30,000 children were taken from their mothers. This was mainly done to unmarried mothers who were young, as their parents wanted to keep the situation under wraps.
Pope Francis, the current 87-year-old head of the Catholic Church, has been making his way through Europe. After making a stop in Luxembourg, one of Belgium’s southern neighbors, he stopped in Belgium for a three-day visit. In these days, he met with not only around 15 sexual abuse survivor but also met with numerous foreign leaders in the King’s official residence last Friday.
At this meeting, each leader had a chance to speak to the group about the situation with the Catholic Church and their issues in their respective countries. During the Belgian King and Prime Minister’s turn to speak, they took time to bring the gathering’s attention to the exact state of the Church in their country, raising the fact that these claims have become a top national priority for the Belgian government.
According to CNN, after this, the two leaders met with the Pope personally and raised the issue again, with Prime Minister Alexander Croo adding “If something goes wrong, we can’t accept cover-ups… concrete steps are needed. The victims must be heard. They must occupy a central place. They have the right to the truth…in order to look forward, the Church must clarify its past.” This has come to a surprise to many as such a frank statement was said to the Pope himself. However, the Pope seemed to agree with them.
“This is the shame, the shame that we must all take in hand today and ask for forgiveness and solve the problem, the shame of abuse, of child abuse,” the Pope said in response. “We think of the time of the ‘Holy Innocents’ and say ‘what a tragedy. What did King Herod do?’ But today, in the Church itself there is this crime.” . In this comment, the Pope is referring to the story of King Herod in the Bible. This story talks about an ancient king of Judea executing every male of two and under.
The Pope also called for the Church to be ashamed for its past actions of not only its members but also the organization as a whole. He has called for the whole institution to look for forgiveness and to look towards ways of preventing situations and actions like these from happening again. The Pope has begun to institute systems in order to prevent it from happening in the future. He also called back to the young mothers who were forced to give up their children for multiple decades due to being unmarried, blaming the stigma surrounding the status of unmarried mothers and calling for the church to be better than following these cultural stigmas.
The Pope has already removed a bishop and nine other people from active service in the church in the South American country of Peru. This has come due to appalling abuses of power that have come out against these members including forced sodomy on their younger recruits.
This all shows a brighter future for the Catholic Church as this newer leadership attempts to rid itself of these terrible actions and look toward forgiveness and ways of prevention for the future generations.
