Belgium Catholic Church Praises Its Courage

Here's my letter to the public editor of the New York Times in reference to the Associated Press story of September 13 about the Belgium Catholic Church's admission of hundreds of instances of sexual abuse. I asked the Times to expand and/or question in these ways:

Antwerp bishop Johan Bonny: ''We have had the courage to let the commission do its work and publish its conclusions." This attitude needs to be questioned editorially. It comes across as a falsehood, pretentious and self-praising. After all these decades courage cannot have been the church's motivation, rather the overwhelming pressure of truth-telling by hundreds of victims, an action that qualifies for the attribution of the word "courage."
Continuing . . .

"On Monday, Leonard said it was up to the Vatican to decide on any punishment.

''"It is not up to Monsignor Vangheluwe himself. The nuncio has assured us that a decision in Rome will be taken with a reasonable time limit,' he said."

I hope the New York Times will discover and report on the laws of Belgium in regard to such abuse. Please question the compelling and timely issue of whether religious bodies are exempt from the laws of the countries in which they practice.

This resonates with the experiences of Somali-born Ayaa Hirsi Ali who received a range of threats, even of death, in the Netherlands when she questioned Muslim "religious" practices such as genital mutilation of young girls being carried on in immigrant communities living there and in other Western countries. Hirsi Ali questions whether nation-states should continue to use the guise of "religious freedom" to look the other way at "religious" practices defined by the state as criminal. From her book Nomad:

p 217: It is not a trivial thing to know that, even in the West, if you criticize or even analyze a particular religion you may require protection… if you speak out…you yourself … will become a target, stalked, ostracized, even murdered. . . Most people consciously or not, seek to avoid it. Fear has an effect.

. . .

Thus slowly,. . . people begin to get used to not saying certain things, or they say them but certainly won’t write them. The thin fingers of self-censorship begin to tighten around individual minds, then groups of people, then around ideas themselves and their expression. When free speech crumbles in this way, . . . when Westerners refrain from criticizing or questioning certain practices, certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon their own values. Once they have done that, their society is lost.”