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

Let’s grant that Tom De Cock, a 41-year-old Flemish radio DJ, television personality and author, who’s gay and married, isn’t necessarily representative of the entire population of Belgium, a complex nation of 11.7 million people set to host Pope Francis for a three-day visit this coming weekend.

On the other hand, De Cock’s popularity suggests he doesn’t speak just for himself – and, to say the least, he’s not exactly over the moon about the looming papal visit.

In July, De Cock announced that he was renouncing a fellowship at the Catholic University of Leuven, which the pope is scheduled to visit on 27 September, and would not take part in celebrations of the university’s 600th anniversary, despite being an alumnus, in protest over its welcome for the pontiff.

In a piece for the newspaper De Morgen, he said he objects to rolling out the red carpet for the head of a Church which, 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 that. The man is the head of a criminal organisation,” 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 realise that?”

While not everyone might be quite that acerbic, De Cock is hardly alone. One trend in Belgium these days, for instance, is “de-baptism”, meaning requests by people to remove their names from the Church’s baptismal rolls.

Belgium being Belgium, there’s even resentment here. 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 their name in the register, on the theological grounds that baptism is irreversible. Unsatisfied, some disgruntled Belgians are asking 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 for de-baptism last year, he put the reason succinctly: “I do not want to be a member of an institute that has covered up abuse worldwide,” accusing the Catholic Church of operating like a “mafia”.

All this illustrates why Francis’s impending outing to Belgium and Luxembourg, marking the 46th international trip of his papacy, in some ways is likely to be among the most daunting.

In theory, one might think the Pope should enjoy a home-court 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 recently as 1900, official statistics claimed that 99 per cent of the population was Catholic.

Today that share has fallen to 57 per cent, but the Church still boasts an extensive network of Catholic schools, including two internationally recognised universities, and also provides over half the total number of hospital beds in the country and a third of its nursing homes.

In one sign of recognition for the Church’s role, to this day priest salaries are paid by the state. With roughly 1,800 priests and an average annual salary of around $58,000, according to the Economic Research Institute, that represents a total outlay in excess of $100 million.

And, yet.

Yet Catholic fortunes in Belgium have dimmed significantly in recent decades, due to a concentric set of three basic forces. The first is the root sociological trend in western Europe toward ever greater secularisation.

One measure of those inroads is Mass attendance. Officially, the rate is estimated at somewhere between 6 and 10 per cent, which would be dismal enough. However, an actual head count on the third Sunday of October in 2022 found just 172,968 people in the pews – which, assuming that Sunday was typical, would suggest an actual rate of just 2.6 per cent.

No matter which measure one examines – priests, religious, weddings, baptisms, confirmations, etc. – statistics show steep declines across the board. Between 2017 and 2022 alone, the Belgian Church lost 915 diocesan priests, representing a 33 percent drop.

That’s not say the lights are about to go out.

Organisers of the papal trip recently announced they were releasing an additional 2,500 tickets for the papal Mass on Sunday at King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels, after the initial 35,000 spaces were all snapped up. The additional spots will be along the track, organisers said, with limited viewing augmented by jumbotrons.

Nevertheless, the long-term trajectory isn’t encouraging for the Church, which seems destined more and more to represent a subculture in a largely secular milieu.

The second force affecting the Church’s standing is the largely progressive political climate of the country, which makes Catholic positions on matters such as abortion, birth control, gay rights and women deeply unpopular.

Belgium became the second country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage in 2003, and from 2011 to 2014 its prime minister was the openly gay Elio Di Rupo, at the time one of only two prime ministers in the world to identify as LGBTQ+. A recent US News and World Report survey ranked it as one of the ten most progressive countries in the world.

Far-right forces did recently make historic gains in June elections, but most observers believe that was mostly an anti-immigration vote that doesn’t signify a real mutation in basically liberal and permissive social attitudes. One sign of the times is that an openly gay singer named Christoff De Bolle apparently will 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.”

To some extent, Pope Francis may not feel the full brunt of disapproval of the Church’s conservative stances on many contested matters because of his personal reputation as a maverick, empowering women and reaching out to the LGBTQ+ community.

On the other hand, the prevailing social climate probably implies that any pope, no matter how personally popular, is likely to find Belgium a tough room.

Finally, there’s 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 charges first surfaced in 2010, Vangheluwe eventually admitted to several acts of sexual abuse, including some against his own nephews.

Along the way, recordings surfaced of the former Archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, seemingly discouraging one of Vangheluwe’s nephews from going public with his accusations. The leaks fueled public impressions of a systematic cover-up.

More recently, Dutch-speaking Belgium was outraged last year by the broadcast of a television documentary titled Godvergeten, or “Godforsaken”, documenting multiple cases of abuse by Catholic priests.

The program enjoyed massive success, garnering an audience of roughly 800,000 for each episode, representing around twelve per cent of the total population in Flanders, and given its media echo, it’s believed that at least three million people were following its contents. The Flemish government’s hotline for victims of violence recorded a 31 per cent increase in calls after the series.

The broadcast also sparked a new parliamentary inquiry in Flanders, with some legislators floating the idea of withholding priest salaries and devoting them to a compensation fund for victims.

Yet even after that shock, many critics say the Belgian bishops don’t seem to have fully absorbed the lessons of the scandals. In May, for instance, there was widespread backlash in Brussels after it emerged that three priests accused of abuse had been placed on a slate of candidates to be elected to the archdiocese’s presbyteral council.

Archbishop Luc Terlinden immediately apologised, calling it a “grave mistake”, but many people couldn’t help wondering how such a blunder was even possible.

Pope Francis is scheduled to meet 15 victims of abuse while in Belgium, but even that act of outreach has generated controversy.

A victims’ advocacy group called Werkgroep Mensenrechten in de Kerk, “Working Group for Human Rights in the Church”, has objected that at least as far as anyone knows, no survivor who appeared in last year’s documentary is among the group. They’ve also asked that the session should last exactly 34 minutes and 31 seconds, representing one second per Belgian victim of sexual abuse in the Church, according to an official register of complaints, and it’s unclear if that will happen either.

To sum up, Pope Francis faces a steep mountain to climb in Belgium in persuading a fairly jaded public to give the Catholic Church another chance – or, at least, to stop seeing it as the enemy.

While it’s true that many papal trips generate a lot of gloom-and-doom forecasts in advance, only to be replaced by positive images of adoring crowds once he actually arrives, the question still remains if such an outing can produce a lasting impact on the basic cultural calculus.

If he can pull it off, it might create a template for engaging other deeply secular societies. If he can’t, some might wonder if this was the Church’s last, best chance in Belgium gone awry.

RELATED: Belgian Catholic university accused of belittling Pope’s visit due to ‘militant left-wing’ ethos

Photo collage: (left) Pope Francis during a visit to Saint Theresa’s Home, a Catholic nursing home, in Singapore, Singapore Island, 13 September 2024. (Photo by TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images.) / (right) Belgium Prime Minister Alexander De Croo holds the Rainbow and European Union flags as he takes part in ‘Brussels Pride’, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) celebration, in Brussels, Belgium, 20 May 2023. (Photo by NICOLAS MAETERLINCK/Belga/AFP via Getty Images.)

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