CathInfo.com

Belgian Report on Catholic Church Atrocities
September 11th, 2010

Via: AP:

Hundreds of sex abuse victims have come forward in Belgium with harrowing accounts of molestation by Catholic clergy that reportedly led to at least 13 ѕυιcιdєs and affected children as young as two, an independent Belgian commission said Friday.

Professor Peter Adriaenssens, chairman of the commission, said the abuse in Belgium may have been even more rampant than the 200-page report suggests, because his panel’s work was interrupted and all its files seized in a June 24 raid by Belgian judicial authorities who are conducting their own probe.

Adriaenssens, a child psychiatrist who has worked with trauma victims for 23 years, said nothing had prepared him for the stories of abuse that blighted the lives of victims. He called the report’s findings “a body blow” to the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium.

Belgian church authorities said they would react on Monday to the report. The Vatican had no immediate comment.

The report’s findings are the latest embarrassment for Belgium’s Catholic Church, which is still reeling after the April resignation of Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who admitted to having sɛҳuąƖly abused a nephew for years when he was a priest and bishop.

Friday’s report lists 507 witnesses who came forward with stories of molestation at the hands of clergy over the past decades. It says those abused included children who were two, four, five and six years old.

Questioning your Cardinal's silence/ ignorance on the sex abuse scandal = "disobedience".

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2010/09/danneels-sincere-sympathy.html

Alexandra Colen writes for The Brussels Journal:

"Once again Belgium is in shock. Yesterday Professor Adriaenssens, the man who headed the committee that was established to collect and investigate instances of sɛҳuąƖ abuse and pedophilia in the Catholic Church in Belgium, presented his report [pdf] and conclusions. The extent and degree of abuse that turns out to have been widespread, is horrifying. The Belgian Cardinal Danneels’s response to the report is entirely in character. This man will never change. His spokesman said that Cardinal Danneels “once again expresses sincere sympathy with the victims and their families for the suffering that they experienced…” and adds some platitudes about structures and institutions. Yet for decades he was responsible for the fact that complaints by the victims and their families were ignored. He made himself scarce whenever churchgoers who encountered abuses appealed to him.

In 1998 when I wished to discuss the content of the pedophile catechism manual Roeach that my children had to use at school, he employed his classic strategy: He made sure he knew nothing by avoiding any contact with the complaining party, and if they persevered he attempted to damage their credibility. In my case he repeatedly refused to receive a delegation of the hundreds of parents who stood at his door. In the press he questioned my motives and he sent others to reprimand me privately for being “disobedient” to the Church. Many parents came to me with accounts of similar experiences. Parents were fobbed off with vague comments and shush-shushing expressions of sympathy. Yet he was the one who should have conducted investigations and taken measures.

The rampant pedophilia and child abuse in the Belgian Church is not, as some say, caused by structural inadequacies, but by individuals who refused to assume their responsibility. Each teacher or head of a school, each parish priest, bishop or archbishop who refused to take remarks or complaints by parents seriously, who neglected to take measures in their school, parish or diocese, has contributed to the culture in which pedophiles could do as they pleased and destroy the lives of hundreds, thousands of children and their families."

The worst is the Neo-Cath idea that to question your Bishop publicly based on his public actions equals "disobedience".

Their logic would have us all be mute robots who sit idly by while our Bishop publicly compromises the faith, fails to defend it, defies Papal decrees, allows liturgical abuses, etc.

The Neo-Caths decry the sex abuse, but perpetuate the false obedience to Bishops which allowed the sex abuse to continue for decades.