Pope Francis, Visiting Belgium, Is Met With Anger Over Clerical Sexual Abuse

During a trip to Luxembourg and Belgium, Francis will spend an hour meeting with 15 people who were abused by Roman Catholic clergy. Survivors say it is not enough.

Pope Francis was due to meet on Friday with 15 people who were sexually abused by members of the clergy in Belgium, a largely Roman Catholic country where the church has been plagued by a history of scandal.

Unlike his trip to the Asia Pacific region two weeks ago, when adoring crowds and lively Catholic communities welcomed Francis, the pope’s three-day visit to Belgium has stirred anger and criticism over the church’s response to sexual abuse by priests.

“One hour for 15 people? It’s not really listening,” said Marc De Bosscher, 63, who was sexually abused by a priest in his church outside Brussels in the 1970s, when he was 11 and 12. “It’s some window dressing.”

In his speech to the Belgian authorities on Friday morning, the pope addressed the scandal of abuse of minors with forceful terms. “The church must be ashamed” and “ask for forgiveness,” he said, but also try to solve this situation. “This is our shame and our humiliation,” Francis said.

Many accounts of clerical sexual abuse in Belgium have emerged over recent decades, and the issue exploded in 2010 when the then-bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, admitted having sexually abused his nephew for over a decade. The police started an investigation. More than a decade later, however, no one has been charged. The bishop was allowed to resign without punishment, and Francis defrocked him only this year. In the meantime, hundreds of other cases of clerical abuse and Church inaction have surfaced.

One man who is due to meet with the pope on Friday said in an interview on Thursday that during his time as a student at a Catholic school in Flanders, he and many other children at the school were raped by priests, or by other students who had themselves been raped by priests.

The scale of the sexual abuse was widely known by the school’s leadership, said the man, now 57, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the subject, adding that once a monk even walked in on him being raped and did not intervene.

The man’s best friend, who was routinely sexually abused by priests, later killed himself, he said.

As for meeting with the pope, he said he didn’t expect much. He called on the church to offer funding for psychological counseling to survivors of sexual abuse, many of whom cannot afford it. He also called on the Vatican to stop protecting priests who committed crimes, and said the church protected abusers far more than it looked after survivors.

Public outrage in Belgium resurfaced last year after the release of a documentary series, called “Godforsaken,” on clerical abuse. The country’s Parliament opened an investigation into the subject, and this week it opened a second inquiry focused on possible shortcomings of the police investigation that began over a decade ago.

Before the pope’s visit, Ingrid Schildermans, the documentary’s director, said that she had received many angry calls from abuse survivors.

“For them, it’s very hard that the pope will be received as a superstar,” she said. “To them, he is the leader of a criminal organization with a system of abuse.”

Ms. Schildermans said many felt that the church continued to play down the wreckage that the abuse had brought to their lives, such as when Francis said this month that we “should not forget the many children and teenagers whose dignity was violated.”

“They say, ‘We did not have our dignity violated — we were brutally raped for sometimes more than 10 years, and we still can’t go to the toilet without bleeding,’” Ms. Schildermans said of the survivors.

The issue of sexual abuse has roiled the church for decades, and thousands of cases of assault and cover-ups have emerged across the world. Pope Francis has pledged “zero tolerance” for offenders, and took unprecedented measures to address the issue, but critics say that these steps do not go far enough.

Belgian abuse survivors wrote an open letter to Francis this month, and while they praised him for acknowledging “this disaster” throughout his tenure, they said that more needed to be done.

“The church cannot at the same time condemn homosexuality or abortion and not exclude from its ranks — without waiting for a verdict from human justice — every author of perverse and abject acts which have shattered, often to the point of their death, the lives of so many abused children,” they wrote.

Rik Devillé, a retired Belgian priest who has documented instances of sexual abuse in the church for three decades, said in an interview that the pope’s meeting with people who were sexual abused by priests and clergy was an insufficient acknowledgment of the pain that decades of abuse had inflicted.

“Real recognition and financial compensation so that these victims can continue to live in a dignified way, that’s what’s needed,” he said.

The pope’s trip to Belgium was arranged to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the country’s two Christian universities, U.C. Louvain and the Catholic University of Leuven, known as KU Leuven, where he will meet with refugees.

He is also set to visit Collège Saint-Michel, a Jesuit school in Brussels, where some of the survivors who wrote the open letter were abused. The trip, which began in Luxembourg, will conclude with a Mass on Sunday at a stadium in Brussels.

Luc Sels, the rector of KU Leuven, said he understood criticism that the pope was meeting with too few people who had been sexually abused, but that the format would allow the pope to have individual conversations with them.

“Will the conversations be enough? Of course not,” Mr. Sels said. “The loss of trust in the institution of the church is such that it will take many more years before we find some peace.”