Belgian church panel disbands after police raid

BRUSSELS, Belgium — BRUSSELS - A panel appointed by the Catholic Church to investigate clerical sex abuse in Belgium is shutting down after police seized all its files during a raid last week, the group’s chairman said Monday.

Peter Adriaenssens, a child psychiatrist who chaired the panel, said authorities betrayed the trust of nearly 500 victims who had made complaints over the past two months to the church panel and blamed state prosecutors for pursuing victims too traumatized to speak to police.

“We were bait,” he said.

The panel was shutting because it had no files to work from, Adriaenssens said. On Thursday, police raided its offices, seized documents and computers from the Belgian archbishop’s office and opened a prelate’s crypt in a cathedral.

“It is now up to [Belgian] bishops to care for victims and follow up their complaints,” the panel said in a statement.

Glenn Audenaert, the head of Belgium’s judiciary police, said: “I respect Peter Adriaenssens, but his commission was created by the church. That commission cannot start a prosecution. Only the Justice Department can.”

On Sunday, Pope BenedictXVI denounced the raids as “deplorable” - his first public comment on the deepening diplomatic rift between Belgium and the Vatican over the police raids.

Adriaenssens linked the raids to a state investigation into a possible cover-up of abuse by the Catholic Church.

The Belgian church was rocked by the April 24 resignation of its longest-serving bishop, Roger Vangheluwe, who stepped down after admitting sexually abusing a young boy when former Archbishop Godfried Danneels was in charge.

Danneels resigned in January after victims said he had not responded to their complaints.

The Catholic panel had been in existence for over a decade, but for most of that time it dealt with only 30 complaints and took no discernible action on them.

Rik Torfs, a canon law expert, said the Catholic Church has a poor record of investigating sex-abuse claims. “It has failed badly in its treatment of many of these cases,” he said. “The church always found their fate less important than its own prestige.”

Meanwhile, the Vatican issued an unprecedented public rebuke Monday of a leading cardinal who had questioned the church’s policy of celibacy and openly criticized the retired Vatican No. 2 for his handling of clerical sex-abuse cases.

In a statement, the Vatican said only the pope can make such accusations against a cardinal, not another so-called prince of the church.

In April, Vienna’s archbishop, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, accused the former Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, of blocking an investigation into a sex-abuse scandal that rocked Austria’s church 15 years ago.

Schoenborn also accused Sodano of causing “massive harm” to victims when he dismissed claims of clerical abuse as “petty gossip” on Easter Sunday.

Schoenborn has been a leading figure in the abuse crisis, forcefully denouncing abuse, presiding over service of reparations for victims and openly calling for an honest examination of issues like celibacy.

Information for this article was contributed by Nicole Winfield of The Associated Press.