On a day of stark criticism, the King of Belgium, the Prime Minister, and the rector of the Catholic university that invited him all condemned the institution Pope Francis heads for a range of transgressions: covering up clergy sex abuse and lagging behind in embracing women and the LGBTQ+ community within the church.

This came before Francis met with those most harmed by the Church in Belgium – survivors of childhood sexual abuse by priests. Seventeen survivors spent two hours with Francis on Friday evening, sharing their trauma, shame, and pain, and demanding reparations from the church.

Throughout, Francis expressed remorse, begged forgiveness, and pledged to do everything possible to prevent such abuses from happening again. “This is our shame and humiliation,” he acknowledged in his first public remarks on Belgian soil.

Francis has visited countries with a history of church wrongdoing before. He apologized to Irish abuse survivors in 2018 and travelled to Canada in 2022 to atone for the church-run residential schools that traumatized generations of Indigenous peoples.

But it’s difficult to recall a single day where the leader of the 1.3 billion-strong Catholic Church faced such forceful public criticism from a nation’s highest institutional figures – royalty, government, and academia – regarding the church’s crimes and its seemingly out-of-touch responses to the needs of contemporary Catholics.

Luc Sels, the rector of Leuven Catholic University, whose 600th anniversary was the official reason for Francis’s trip to Belgium, told the Pope that the abuse scandals had so weakened the church’s moral authority that it would need to reform to regain its credibility and relevance.

“Wouldn’t the church be a warmer place if women were given a prominent place, the most prominent place, also in priesthood?” Sells asked the Pope.

“Wouldn’t the church in our region gain moral authority if it were not so rigid in its approach to gender and diversity issues? And if it did, like the university does, open its arms more to the LGBTQ+ community?” he asked.

These comments undoubtedly reflected the views of European social progressives, but they also reflected the reform-minded church that Francis has, to some extent, embraced in his efforts to make the universal church more relevant and responsive to Catholics today.

The day began with King Philippe welcoming Francis to Laeken Castle, the residence of Belgium’s royal family, and citing the abuse and forced adoption scandals in demanding the church work “incessantly” to atone for the crimes and help victims heal.

He was followed by the Prime Minister, who was also granted the opportunity to speak, an exception to usual Vatican protocol. He used this face-to-face public encounter to demand “concrete steps” to be taken to fully disclose the extent of the abuse scandal and prioritize the interests of victims over those of the church.

“Victims need to be heard. They need to be at the center. They have a right to truth. Misdeeds need to be recognized,” he told the Pope. “When something goes wrong we cannot accept cover-ups,” he said. “To be able to look into the future, the church needs to come clean on its past.”

It was one of the most pointed welcome speeches ever directed at the Pope during a foreign trip, where the usual genteel dictates of diplomatic protocol typically keep public remarks free of outrage.

But the tone underscored just how raw the abuse scandal still is in Belgium, where two decades of revelations of abuse and systematic cover-ups have devastated the hierarchy’s credibility and contributed to an overall decline in Catholicism and the influence of the once-powerful church.

Overall, victims welcomed the words from both church and state. Survivor Emmanuel Henckens said that “to an extent they went to the crux of the evil. He said it was no longer possible to look the other way.”

But another abuse survivor, Koen Van Sumere, said it was now essential for the church to provide victims with substantial financial settlements.

“If you want to move toward forgiveness and reconciliation it is not sufficient to only say ‘I am sorry’ but you have to bear the consequences it entails and you should compensate the damages,” Van Sumere said. He said so far what the Belgian church had paid out “amounted to alms” and that the settlement he received for his abuse didn’t even cover the costs of his therapy.

The victims, 17 of whom met with Francis at the Vatican residence Friday evening, had penned an open letter to him demanding a universal system of church reparations for their traumas. In a statement after the meeting, the Vatican said Francis would study their requests.

“The pope was able to listen and get close to their suffering, expressed gratitude for their courage, and the feeling of shame for what they suffered as children because of the priests to whom they were entrusted, noting the requests made to him so that he could study them,” said a statement from the Vatican spokesman.

Revelations of Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal have trickled out in bits over a quarter-century, punctuated by a bombshell in 2010 when the country’s longest-serving bishop, Brugge Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, was allowed to resign without punishment after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew for 13 years.

Francis only defrocked Vangheluwe earlier this year, in a move clearly designed to remove a lingering source of outrage among Belgians before his visit.

In September 2010, the church released a 200-page report that said 507 people had come forward with stories of being molested by priests, including when they were as young as 2. It identified at least 13 suicides by victims and attempts by six more.

Victims and advocates say those findings were just the tip of the iceberg and that the true scope of the scandal is far greater.

In his remarks, Francis insisted that the church was “addressing firmly and decisively” the abuse problem by implementing prevention programs, listening to victims, and accompanying them to heal.

But after the astonishing dressing-down by the prime minister and king, Francis went off-script to express the shame of the church for the scandal and voice his commitment to ending it.

“The church must be ashamed and ask for forgiveness and try to resolve this situation with Christian humility and put all the possibilities in places so that this doesn’t happen again,” Francis said. “But even if it were only one (victim), it is enough to be ashamed.”

The prime minister, king, and pope also referred to a new church-related scandal rocking Belgium, over so-called “forced adoptions,” which echoed earlier revelations about Ireland’s so-called mother and baby homes.

After World War II and through to the 1980s, many single mothers were forced by the Belgian church to offer their newborns up for adoption, with money changing hands.

Francis said he was “saddened” to learn of these practices, but said such criminality was “mixed in with what was unfortunately the prevailing view in all parts of society at this time.”