An interview with the Antwerp bishop Johan Bonny (pictured) appearing in this week’s Knack magazine was presumably intended to shift the focus of the question of child sexual abuse by clergy away from the guilty – the former bishop of Brugge, Roger Vangheluwe – and from the negligent – represented by Cardinal Godfried Danneels – to someone with clean hands.
However Bonny reveals himself to be just the latest in a line of unapologetic apologists. In a few brief statements, he manages to find space for all of the most current excuses, evasions and weasel-words. It’s worth looking at it closely, for it represents the core thinking of the Church on this matter.
(The translation is my own. Some passages have been omitted for space and flow. The full text in Dutch can be read here. The most recent news in the scandal, the publication of the report of the Adriaenssens Commission, set up to investigate child sexual abuse by clergy, is covered here.)
Interviewer Cathy Galle begins by asking Bonny if the idea of a new Commission for Recognition, Healing and Reconciliation advanced by the Belgian bishops’ conference is not an attempt by the Church to handle its problems in-house.
JB: The Church may not and does not wish to run away from its responsibilities. So it was up to the Church itself to take the initiative. We want to work in transparent dialogue with the others involved. For that reason we propose four experts, four new “Adriaenssens” you might say, engaged for their professional competence. People from outside the Church, who can restore confidence.
AH: I think it’s clear by now that the Church very much does want to run away from its responsibilities. Example 1: Danneels’ attempt to protect Vangheluwe – and of course the Church itself – from scandal by suggesting to a victim that he wait for his abuser to resign all in good time rather than have him exposed. See story here. Example 2: Peter Adriaenssens took over the chair of the Commission three years ago, but the body had been chaired by a magistrate for a decade prior to his arrival, during which time not a single member of the clergy was brought to the attention of the judicial authorities. Example 3: When the public prosecutor in Brussels seized the case-files of the Adriaenssens Commission in June, the first step taken by the Church was to attempt to have all searches carried out that day declared void, and all evidence ruled fruit of the poison tree.
Secondly, it should be pointed out that when Bonny hopes the four experts can “restore confidence,” he of course means “confidence in the Church”.CG: Why was the publication of the report necessary for that?
Bonny then claims the Church had a more concrete plan for the new commission worked out, but it was changed following publication of the Adriaenssens report. “We now want to enter into dialogue with the victims, but also with the justice ministry, the prosecutors and the care sector,” Bonny explains.
JB: That report was extremely hard. I knew of stories of clergy who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. But the fact that [the report] consisted of such awful stories, of so much human tragedy, really affected us. I couldn’t read the report in one sitting: the stories, the details, touch you to the depths of your being. It opened eyes, and it led us to realise that we had to broaden our scope. That more dialogue was needed.
AH: Bonny uses the term “geestelijken” to mean all manner of clergy, which means roughly “spiritual people”. That seems to be a common usage, but to these foreign ears could hardly be less appropriate, as if one were talking about abusers and in the same breath referring to them as “men of God”. The report, meanwhile, though it gathers over 200 accounts from victims in one place, can hardly be said to be surprising. Bonny is correct about its impact on the reader. However the constant repetition of victims’ experience of telling their story for it to fall on deaf ears forces one to the conclusion that if more dialogue is indeed necessary, dialogue involving the Church appears to have no purpose whatsoever.CG: Are you saying the bishops had no knowledge of what had been going on all those years?
JB: We knew that things sometimes happened that were not acceptable. Paedophilia occurs throughout society. As a young priest I often talked to the victims of incest who came to me with their stories. But the Adriaenssens report gave us an insight into the extent of the problem. That such horrors took place within our own ranks, on such a huge scale, really made an impact on us.
AH: Here Bonny trots out the old standby excuse: It’s not only priests who abuse children. Every more or less committed supporter of the Church in recent weeks has tried it on, but it won’t wash for three reasons:CG: The working group Human Rights in the Church of [retired] priest Rik Devillé has been going on now for years about hundreds of dossier of abuse by clergy. Nobody ever listened.
1. It’s a variation on “shouldn’t you be out catching real criminals” when stopped for speeding by the police. Of course child abuse happens elsewhere, but that doesn’t lessen either the damage or the culpability when it happens in a Church situation;
2. In none of the circumstances evoked by defenders of the Church – sports clubs, schools, scout troupes etc – does the abuser threaten his victim with eternal damnation. But priests do. It’s typical for abusers to enjoin their victims to silence, obviously, but only the priest knows that his orders are backed up by the threat of burning in Hell. It is, after all, the sanction by which the Catholic Church has ensured obedience throughout its history. Other abusers – teachers, football coaches, and especially parents – have a strong power relationship over the child they’re abusing. But none of them has God on his side.
3. Somewhat related to 2, the Church and its representatives have taken upon themselves the role of moral arbiter, not least in the matter of sexuality. They therefore have farther to fall.
JB: I myself haven’t see the files held by Rik Devillé. When I read in the newspapers that Rik had files that hadn’t been dealt with yet, I called him right away to ask him to send on any files from my bishopric, so that I could take action as head of the Church. He never sent anything on, but he did go to the justice system with the files.
AH: Is anyone surprised? The mind simply boggles at Bonny’s bare-faced nerve. He calls a whistle-blower, as representative of the accused organisation, and asks him to hand over any evidence he may have. And then he’s surprised when the whistleblower declines.CG: That seems to indicate a lack of trust in a Church which wants to judge its own case, and which often failed to take such dossiers seriously in the past. That’s a problem the new centre will have as well.
JB: Look, you have to understand that the Church is going through a learning process. We really want to take this problem on, step by step. We have a lot of catching up to do, but the will is there. Everything right now is in uproar, but you have to give us time and trust.
AH: One of the victims whose testimony is included in the report is in his nineties, another in his seventies. How much time does Bonny think might be needed? Centuries? The Church has only just got around to apologising to Galileo, after all. And where, frankly, does he get the idea his outfit is deserving of anything like “time and trust”? Is it just me, or does that last paragraph of his sound suspiciously like a wife-beater?CG: You argue for closer cooperation with justice and with prosecutors, but at the same time the archbishopric allowed the searches made during Operation Chalice to be ruled inadmissible. That hardly inspires confidence.
JB: They can investigate what they like as far as I’m concerned, but it has to happen in a juridically correct manner. You don’t have to be a leading jurist to see that the searches on 24 June were not carried out correctly. That’s why we’d now like to discuss things with the justice system. We want to work together and avoid being caught up in an impasse.
AH: Bonny may have had inside knowledge, but at the time of the interview it was not commonly known that the main reason the searches in Mechelen were ruled inadmissible was that the magistrate carrying them out took the decision on the spot to open mail addressed to the new archbishop. That’s a big no-no, and rendered the rest of his searches void. What we did know at the time of the interview, on the other hand, is that the Church had tried to argue that Danneels’ computer contained correspondence with the papal nuncio, who’s the equivalent of a diplomat – as if the mere fact of writing to a diplomat covers you with his diplomatic immunity. Also, they said, he had written to the Pope, thereby gaining the confidentiality – for every byte on the machine – of communications with a head of state. You wouldn’t need to be a leading jurist to see how utterly ludicrous such claims are.CG: Canon law allows, in extremely serious cases such as sexual abuse, for the timing-out of cases to be lifted by the Pope. Should that now happen in Monsignor Vangheluwe’s case?
JB: Yes. The papal nuncio has assured us that an answer will be available very soon.
AH: To be clear, there are two time-limits. One is that operated by the legal system, which could be changed or scrapped by a change in the law, but which stands no chance of being, in a country where Catholics hold such sway in every corner of society. The other is Church law, which would allow Vangheluwe to be stripped of his priesthood, for example. To be frank, I don’t think that sort of sanction is what people care about. Even if he were as a result to lose his generous pension of €2800 net per month – which he wouldn’t – I get the impression people still wouldn’t be satisfied. This week we also learned that investigators still want to interview Vangheluwe regarding a second alleged victim. So there’s a small chance he might yet land in a jail cell.The important thing now, Bonny concludes by say, is that “abusers live in a place where they cannot carry out any form of abuse, and where they are forced each day to face up to the consequences of their actions”.
And how might that be done, asks Knack? You might think a jail cell would fit the bill perfectly, but no.
“By for example having to pay a sum of money to support therapy for the victim. But the expert working group also has to clarify that.
So there you have it: the answer according to Bishop Johan Bonny. Put the abuser somewhere he can’t fiddle with kids anymore (this has been done repeatedly in the past, only for the guilty party to be recycled back into a position of being able to abuse again, after the heat has died down); and make sure he pays something (which money, in Belgium, comes ultimately from the taxpayer, whether Catholic or not) for “therapy”. Presume that sort of blood-money would no longer need to be paid after the victim committed suicide, as happened in 14 of the cases contained in the Adriaenssens report.
