Cardinal Godfried Danneels
Controversial liberal head of the Catholic Church in Belgium who presided over 30 years of decline
GODFRIED DANNEELS, the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines-brussels, who has died aged 85, presided over the Catholic Church in Belgium for more than 30 years and was one of the international standard bearers of the liberal and progressive wing of the Church.
His period in office saw an unparalleled decline in the Church’s fortunes, with the influence of the once mighty Belgian Church reduced to insignificance. Danneels was also implicated in the cover-up of child abuse, but despite this he enjoyed the confidence of Pope Francis to the end.
Godfried Maria Jules Danneels was born on June 4 1933 at Kanegem, a small town in West Flanders, a Flemish-speaking and fervently Catholic part of Belgium. The son of a headmaster, he was the eldest of six children. He was ordained in 1957 in the city of Bruges.
He carried on with his studies in Louvain, Belgium’s leading Catholic university, and later at the Gregorian University in Rome. Having obtained a doctorate, which dealt with the medieval theologian Henry of Ghent, he returned home and taught sacramental and liturgical theology at the seminary in Bruges and the university in Louvain.
The Church was undergoing a period of change following the Second Vatican Council, and the young professor took a great interest in the Church’s liturgy, at a time when the traditional Latin Mass was giving way to the new Mass in the vernacular.
In 1977, because of his academic background, Pope Paul VI appointed Danneels, at the relatively early age of 44, to the important see of Antwerp. A little over two years later, the newly elected Pope John Paul II transferred him to the primatial see of Malines-brussels, which made him head of the national hierarchy and brought with it a cardinal’s hat, which he duly received in 1983.
Though a small country, Belgium had long punched above its weight in the Catholic world; many of the leading 20th century churchmen had been Belgians. Though the rot had set in before Danneels took the helm, all this was destined to change during the next 30 years.
Fluent in many languages, including Italian, and trusted and liked by the important German liberal faction, whose language he also spoke, Danneels was an important and influential figure in Rome. He had a place on several Vatican congregations, including the one that oversaw the appointment of new bishops, even if he may not have been in sympathy with the conservative agenda of John Paul II.
Nevertheless, when the Pope wished to bring the liberal Dutch church into line, it was to Danneels that he turned as an intermediary. Throughout the Pope’s reign, Danneels was an indispensable figure behind the scenes at synods. Though in person reserved, he was an able committee man, a star of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
As Cardinal of Belgium he also acted as personal chaplain to the Belgian Royal Family, presiding at baptisms, weddings and funerals. But despite these high-profile roles, the influence of the Church continued to wane in Belgian life, with the legalisation of abortion, same-sex unions and euthanasia.
When King Baudouin was presented with a bill to legalise abortion in 1990, he refused to sign it, eventually using a constitutional loophole to avoid doing so, by abdicating for one day. Cardinal Danneels – uniquely for someone who had taken an oath to uphold Church teaching with his blood
– had no such scruples and advised the King that he could in good conscience sign.
In 1998 Danneels found himself in court as a witness defending the Church on the charge that it had knowingly covered up the crimes of a paedophile priest. There was worse to come. The Bishop of Bruges was forced to resign in disgrace in 2010 after it became known that he had abused a young man, his own nephew, for 15 years.
The nephew had previously approached Danneels and asked him to sack the bishop, but the Cardinal had not only failed to do so but had tried to get the man to keep silent until the bishop resigned at the end of his tenure. Moreover, he asked the nephew to seek forgiveness and hinted that he, the nephew, was blackmailing the Church.
Unfortunately for Danneels, the nephew had taped their conversation, transcripts of which were later published by the daily newspaper De Standaard. Danneels claimed he was “improvising” in this embarrassing conversation, whatever that meant, but he had demonstrated that despite three decades at the helm, he had no real appreciation of how serious the paedophilia crisis was.
By this time Danneels was already in retirement and might have been expected to keep a low profile, or even been hustled off into obscurity. But despite the scandal he retained the confidence of many leading churchmen.
In 2005 Danneels had been touted as a possible successor to John Paul II in the conclave that elected the conservative Cardinal Ratzinger as Benedict XVI. After Benedict’s resignation, Pope Francis’s election in 2013 was considered a huge surprise, but Danneels boasted in his authorised 2015 biography that he and his friends had been instrumental in ensuring Francis’s election.
For some years, Danneels and other liberal cardinals had been meeting at St Gallen in Switzerland, hoping to bring about what they saw as a more modern and enlightened Church, and specifically to ensure the papal election of Cardinal Bergoglio. This unforced revelation, along with the revelation of his support for gay marriage in Belgium, was profoundly shocking to many Catholics, for it demonstrated that Danneels and his coterie had been doing their best to undermine the papacy of Benedict XVI, as well as trying to influence the outcome of a papal election, which carries the penalty of automatic excommunication.
Despite this, Pope Francis continued to favour Danneels, appointing him to the Synod on the Family in 2014 and 2015. This choice by the pontiff was met with widespread dismay, and seen as Danneels’s reward for the part he had played in ensuring Bergoglio’s election as Pope. As one cynical Vaticanista commented: “Francis is rewarding his mates.”
Godfried Danneels, born June 4 1933, died March 14 2019