2023-11-15 05:30:04
LETTER FROM BENELUX
Retired priest Rik Devillé testifies at the Belgian Federal Parliament, in Brussels, during the House commission of inquiry into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, November 10, 2023. NICOLAS MAETERLINCK / AFP
On this morning of November 10, the retired priest came to testify before deputies about these countless tragedies of sexual abuse which he has dealt with for more than thirty years and on which Godforsaken (“forgotten by God”), a documentary from the Flemish public channel VRT, has just violently shone the spotlight. “It’s a miracle that, thanks to this show, victims were finally able to talk about the ordeals they went through”says Rik Devillé, 79, who fights tirelessly so that the Catholic Church and Belgian society finally take the measure of crimes that they have denied for too long.
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The open testimonies of around fifteen men and women recounting the ordeal that men of the Church put them through were of such force that the political world felt obliged to react: a commission of parliamentary inquiry was set up to hear again the victims and those who, for a long time and in vain, spoke out, namely the members of the group Human Rights in the Church, co-founded by Mr. Devillé.
MEPs will have to assess whether or not progress has been made since 2010 and the work of a first commission, established in the wake of the revelations on the Vangheluwe affair, named after the Bishop of Bruges. A man who was the author of hundreds of rapes against his nephew but who, when a priest from his diocese told him of his desire to get married, blurted out to him: “We can’t fall any lower…” And revoked him immediately, says Rik Devillé.
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“The subject is still relevant”
On all the benches of the Parliamentary Assembly, there was silence, too, when the diocesan priest told the story of this woman, now 83 years old, illiterate because she refused to go again to school after being raped. And whose love life was ruined because, on her wedding night, her husband discovered that she was no longer a virgin.
Eva was 14 years old when she was abused. After confiding, she was arrested for indecency and vagrancy. She died during the filming of Godforsakenwithout being able to obtain compensation. “And I could continue”, deplores Rik Devillé, who still wanted to talk about Nina, a young woman of 22, who reacts violently as soon as a man approaches her. At first, his mother did not understand, until the revelation of a rape suffered at the age of 6.
In front of elected officials, white hair, straight gaze, well-spoken voice, the former priest of Buizingen, in Flemish Brabant, sometimes apologizes. For his disorder, for his fear of not always finding the right words to speak as he should about everything he discovered through welcoming witnesses. In reality, he knows like the back of his hand the hundreds of files that he kept for a long time in the cellar of his small house in Tollembeek before putting them in a safe place. He quotes Schopenhauer, who wrote that a truth always passes through three stages: “It is ridiculed, contested, then taken as obvious. »
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