Pope Francis faces tough audience in Belgium – could be his most daunting trip yet

Let’s admit that Tom De Cock, a 41-year-old Flemish radio DJ, television personality and author, who is gay and married, is not necessarily representative of the entire population of Belgium, a complex country of 11.7 million people that is hosting Pope Francis this weekend for a three-day visit.

On the other hand, De Cock’s popularity suggests that he is not speaking only for himself. Moreover, he is, to put it mildly, not exactly happy about the approaching papal visit.

In July, De Cock announced that he would resign from a fellowship at the Catholic University of Leuven, which the Pope was due to visit on 27 September. He would also not participate in the celebration of the university’s 600th anniversary, despite his alumnus status. He protested the Pope’s hospitable reception.

In a piece for the newspaper The Morning, He said he objects to rolling out the red carpet for the head of a church he charged is complicit in “adoption fraud, war, embezzlement, abuse of power, oppression of women and the systematic abuse of hundreds of thousands of children.”

“Receiving this pope as if he were a venerable head of state: I don’t get it. The man is the head of a criminal organization,” De Cock wrote. “To put it bluntly: how many more baby bodies are we going to dig up in the gardens of monasteries before we realize that?”

While not everyone is so cynical, De Cock is not alone. For example, a trend in Belgium these days is “de-baptism,” which means that people request to have their names removed from the church’s baptismal rolls.

Belgium being Belgium, there is even resentment. The local church’s procedure is to make a note that the individual no longer wishes to be part of the church, but to leave his name on the register, on the theological grounds that baptism is irreversible. Disgruntled, some disgruntled Belgians are asking the courts to force the church to comply with a codicil of European law that requires institutions to delete personal data at the user’s request.

When popular newspaper cartoonist Steven Degryse, known by the pseudonym “Lectrr,” filed a request for debaptism last year, he stated his reason succinctly: “I don’t want to be a member of an institution that covers up abuse worldwide,” and accused the Catholic Church of operating like a “mafia.”

All of which illustrates why Francis’ upcoming trip to Belgium and Luxembourg, which marks the 46th international tour of his papacy, is likely to be one of the most daunting in some ways.

In theory, you might think that the Pope should have a home-field advantage.

During the Protestant Reformation, Spanish Habsburg rule, combined with the apostolic zeal of the new Jesuit and Capuchin orders, succeeded in preserving modern-day Belgium for the church. As late as 1900, official statistics claimed that 99 percent of the population was Catholic.

Today, that share has dropped to 57 percent, but the Church still has an extensive network of Catholic schools, including two internationally recognized universities, more than half of the country’s hospital beds and a third of its nursing homes.

In recognition of the Church’s role, priests’ salaries are still paid by the state to this day. With about 1,800 priests and an average annual salary of about $58,000, according to the Economic Research Institute, that represents a total expenditure of more than $100 million.

And yet.

Yet Catholic fortunes in Belgium have declined significantly in recent decades, due to a concentric set of three basic forces. The first is the fundamental sociological trend in Western Europe toward ever greater secularization.

One measure of that progress is attendance at Mass. Officially, the figure is estimated at somewhere between 6 and 10 percent, which would be bad enough. However, an actual count on the third Sunday in October 2022 found only 172,968 people in the pews—which, assuming that Sunday was normal, would suggest an actual figure of just 2.6 percent.

Regardless of which measure one looks at – priests, religious, marriages, baptisms, confirmations, etc. – statistics show a sharp decline across the board. Between 2017 and 2022 alone, the Belgian Church lost 915 diocesan priests, a decline of 33 percent.

That doesn’t mean the lights are about to go out.

Organizers of the papal trip recently announced they were releasing 2,500 extra tickets for Sunday’s papal mass at the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels, after the initial 35,000 seats were all taken. The extra seats will be trackside, organizers said, with limited visibility supplemented by jumbotrons.

Yet the long-term picture is not encouraging for the Church, which increasingly appears to be becoming a subculture in a largely secular environment.

The second factor influencing the Church’s position is the country’s predominantly progressive political climate, which makes Catholic positions on issues such as abortion, birth control, gay rights and women’s rights very unpopular.

Belgium became the second country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage in 2003, and from 2011 to 2014 its prime minister was openly gay Elio Di Rupo, one of only two prime ministers in the world to identify as LGBTQ+. A recent American News and World Report A study has shown that the country is among the ten most progressive countries in the world.

Far-right forces recently made historic gains in the June elections, but most observers believe that this was largely an anti-immigration vote that does not represent a real mutation in the basically liberal and permissive social attitudes. A sign of the times is that an openly gay singer named Christoff De Bolle will apparently perform for the Pope. Christoff declared in 2021: “I don’t need the church to be religious. It’s just an institution. An outdated institution.”

Pope Francis may not feel particularly inclined to condemn the Church’s conservative positions on many contentious issues, given his personal reputation as an independent politician committed to women’s empowerment and the LGBTQ+ community.

On the other hand, the prevailing social climate will probably mean that any pope, regardless of his personal popularity, will find Belgium a difficult place to be.

Finally, there is the impact of the sexual abuse scandals.

Belgium has been particularly hard hit, including the notorious case of Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who was laicized by the Vatican in March. After the allegations first surfaced in 2010, Vangheluwe eventually admitted to multiple sexual abuses, including against his own nephews.

Along the way, recordings surfaced of the former Archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who appeared to dissuade one of Vangheluwe’s nephews from making his accusations public. The leaks fueled the public impression of a systematic cover-up.

More recently, Dutch-speaking Belgium was outraged last year over the broadcast of a television documentary entitled God Forgottenor “God Forgotten”, which documents several cases of abuse by Catholic priests.

The program was a huge success, attracting around 800,000 viewers for each episode, which is about twelve percent of the total population in Flanders. Given the media echo, it is assumed that at least three million people followed the content. The Flemish government’s hotline for victims of violence registered a 31 percent increase in the number of calls after the series.

The broadcast also led to a new parliamentary inquiry in Flanders, with some lawmakers raising the idea of ​​withholding priests’ salaries and putting them towards a compensation fund for victims.

But even after that shock, many critics say the Belgian bishops still don’t seem to have fully grasped the lessons of the scandals. In May, for example, there was widespread backlash in Brussels after it emerged that three priests accused of abuse had been placed on a list of candidates for election to the archdiocese’s presbyteral council.

Archbishop Luc Terlinden immediately apologized and called it a “serious mistake,” but many people wondered how such a blunder was even possible.

Pope Francis will meet 15 victims of abuse during his stay in Belgium, but even that meeting has sparked controversy.

A victims’ advocacy organization called Working Group on Human Rights in the Church“Working Group for Human Rights in the Church” has objected that, as far as is known, none of the survivors who appeared in last year’s documentary belong to the group. They have also requested that the session last exactly 34 minutes and 31 seconds, which amounts to one second per Belgian victim of sexual abuse in the church, according to an official register of complaints, and it is unclear whether that will happen.

In short, Pope Francis faces a major challenge in Belgium if he is to convince the rather blasé public to give the Catholic Church another chance – or at least to stop seeing it as an enemy.

While it is true that many papal trips are preceded by dire predictions, only to be replaced by positive images of adoring crowds upon arrival, the question remains whether such a jaunt can have a lasting impact on fundamental cultural calculations.

If he succeeds, it could create a blueprint for engaging other deeply secular societies. If he fails, some may wonder if this was the Church in Belgium’s last, best shot that failed.

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