anglomedved

On 23 April this year the Roman Catholic Bishop Vangheluwe of Bruges resigned after being denounced for sexual crimes against his nephew, then a minor, 20 years ago.

The new head of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium, Archbishop Léonard, called publicly for people who had been sexually abused by the members of the church to come forward.

A tidal wave of reports came in to the Church Commission on Sexual Crimes, which immediately began an investigation.

On 24 June the Public Prosecutor seized all the Commission's documents. The Commission resigned. The Church complained through the legal system: right now the documents are in limbo and cannot be used by the Public Prosecutor’s office.

Last Friday, the Commission published an 200-page interim report (n Dutch), based on its work until the seizing of its documents. Half of it is victim statements, half is the Commission's analysis and conclusions.

 It is moving reading.  It is the story of a determination to get at the truth, to face the perpetrators with the facts and the need for them to come clean with the victims and themselves, and to limit the spiritual and psychological damage which has been done.

 Most of the deeds have been reported by people in their 50s and 60s and are no longer punishable by law (sexual abuse cannot be prosecuted later than 10 years after the victim turns 18).  To everyone’s surprise, a third of the crimes were against female minors.

Why did the Public Prosecutor’s office seize the documents? The Commission’s report makes clear its intention to turn over to the Justice Department those priests whose were still prosecutable, preferably with their consent, though in some really bad cases it did so without waiting for this. An understanding on responsibilities had also been reached with the Justice Minister. But individual Public Prosecutors have extensive individual power, and there is a strong anti-clerical (Freemasonry ??) sector of Belgian society, which would like nothing more than to discredit the Church.

I fear they have discredited themselves, and do not weep over the fact…

For most of us there is an enormous sigh of relief. There has been a malaise in the Catholic Church for as long as I have been in the country (25 years). It does not solve everything, but we do have a sense of clear leadership in the Roman Catholic Church.

And there is a knock-on effect on the other denominations, which in my view can affect the ROC in Belgium only positively.

The surrounding country includes some of the richest farmland in Belgium. The local château has housed the same family since the 13^th century, well-known in the high life of Belgium.

The local village has no less than four large farms, in typical Walloon style, with barns, stables and farmhouse around an inner courtyard. 

Yet my immediate impression as I walked though the village of Warnant-Dreye last Sunday afternoon, was of something wrong. It’s difficult to explain: it’s as if there are parts of the country which are blessed, other unblessed. Places which holy people have lived in and sanctified, where people have prayed. And places where they have been too occupied with other things, like making money, to do so.

Warnant-Dreye looks to be in the second category. The village church, rebuilt at the high point of Catholic piety and local wealth before World War I, is unused and deserted. Wire mesh has been placed to protect the stained glass against stones. 

And in no cemetery in Belgium have I seen such a phalanx of large family vaults, in daunting grey stone, proclaiming the sullen pride of slow-accumulated wealth. A joyless place….

8 June 2010

Spent a valuable half-hour with the Fr Pierre, an RC rural dean who knows our Russian Church in Belgium well, talking about the Belgian situation.

He brought to my attention the enormous role that the Belgian Catholic church played in foreign missions during most of the last century, incommensurate with the country’s small size. If I understood him right, there are still more Belgian priests outside the country in the mission field than in the country itself. And they have no wish to return to minister to their native country…..

He made another very apposite remark, which is that increasingly today people in the RC Church in Belgium people are either deeply involved or not at all. There is little or no Fussvolk.

This, linked with my reading of Vincent  Donovan’s ‘Christianity Rediscovered’, is suggesting that mass Christianity is largely a matter of evangelizing an existing ‘tribe’ – in the sense of a group which people fully mutually obliged towards. Interestingly enough there are in fact a number of fairly ‘tribal’ formations around in Belgium. I can think of five:
- the new right in Flanders
- the traditional left in Wallonia
- the upper bourgeoisie/aristocracy
- the business élite
- certain major corporations.

I sometimes wonder whether we should not be trying rather to Christianize the new right – much of which I suspect has a consciousness not dissimilar to that of Russian Christianity -, rather than to demonize it and try and contain it politically. Movements like this point to a dangerous spiritual-social void, which the evil one can get into if we do not beat him to it.

I have been spending more time than I perhaps should have meditating on social, political and economic structures.

We have just passed through the rather unpleasant game of the British general election.

One of the most difficulty things in things politics is the gap between the theory, and the values supposedly undergirding it, reality, where much of this undergirding disappears. Theoretical value is that everyone has the right to an equal say, and that anything with the desire and stamina can enter into the political process.

Reality (in the UK) is that what we have is two or three 'balls of power', with their succession within them based on co-option, confirmed every so often by the people via general elections. Probably the strongest, and certainly the most stable of these balls of power is the Conservatives, not least because they come from the social classes which have considered it their right and due to be in command, and to be well rewarded for this (in terms of how far they can bend the system to maintain a certain base of wealth and the concomitant flexibility). I fear that, in the English system, the Liberal Democrat junior coalition partners are going to fall foul of this.

The reality elsewhere in Europe is not dissimilar. In Belgium, we have our own power class, much of which is the descendants of 19^th century industrial dynasties, often inter-married with the local aristocracy, which sees power perhaps less in political terms, but which is dead set on preserving its heritage from depredations of excessive redistribution. I suspect the private banks, in particular one I often work for ("wealthy people looking after wealthy people's money”) of playing a key role in this system. In France too, the élite class is dead scared of ‘real’ democracy, 'populisme' as it calls it.

There is nothing necessarily morally wrong in this ‘quasi-democratic’ set-up from a Christian standpoint, providing that society retains a reasonable degree of stability, that we are 'godlily and quietly governed', and that a basic provision of education and health care is provided. The danger lies in when the proclaimed values (an equal say for everyone) and the reality are too far apart. However right these values may sound in theory - and however terribly 'un-Christian' it would seem today to question them – the gap remains. Enough for people to talk about a ‘lie’, to be disaffected and opt out of the process. It is therefore imperative that we as Christians should be very careful in the support we give to the ‘democratic' concept. We have no interest as a Church to be martyred for someone else's half-truth.

Traditionally, there has been a sort of tacit social agreement between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' - that the 'haves' are allowed to have, providing the 'have nots' do not become too indigent.  This agreement has been broken in much of Europe. The blame comes on both sides: the 'haves' have often been totally unconcerned with any duty towards the rest, the 'have nots' have been too demanding and punitive, as a result of which the ‘haves’ no longer see themselves as bound by the social obligations that go with wealth, and have moved their wealth out of harm's reach. It would be instructive to know what percentage of the wealth of the Belgian upper class is essentially still in Belgium, and what percentage is in the Far East.