Bart Eeckhout's Dangerous Leap

“Anyone who finds strength and inspiration in their faith to do good deserves respect,” Bart Eeckhout wrote last week in *De Morgen*, following the death of Roger Vangheluwe. A beautiful sentence. But in that very same paragraph, he draws a radical conclusion: the Church and the Pope—and, by extension, every religious institution—have lost so much moral authority that they have also lost the right to have a say in how we shape our society. “And that’s just as well,” he concludes.

These are two consecutive sentences that fundamentally contradict each other. After all, what does “respect for religion” mean if you exclude the social expression and organization of that religion from public debate from the outset? Apparently, no one is surprised by this anymore.

Let me first say where Eeckhout is right, because that deserves no qualification whatsoever. What Vangheluwe did to his nephews—and what countless other victims of clergy worldwide have endured—has been covered up, downplayed, and brushed aside by the Catholic Church as an institution for decades . That is not a matter of interpretation. That is simply what happened. There can never be enough attention, recognition, and redress given to those who had to endure this.

But then there’s that leap. Going from “the Catholic Church has failed miserably as an institution” to “faith therefore no longer deserves a voice in the public debate” is a leap of an entirely different order . It is precisely this intellectual short-circuit that we must dissect, because it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between a specific institution and the broader category of faith itself.

Faith is more than just one failing institution

What went wrong here was not merely one man who happened to betray his own message. It was the leaders of the Catholic Church themselves, who systematically prioritized their own reputation over the safety of children. That fact deserves no qualification whatsoever.

However, that is precisely where Eeckhout goes wrong: he makes a double categorical error. He jumps from the failure of one specific institution to all religious institutions, and then from those institutions to the concept of “faith” in general.

Compare it to what came to light at the Boy Scouts of America, or at USA Gymnastics in the abuse case involving Larry Nassar. In both cases, these were organizations that, for decades, knew about the abuse, covered it up, and protected the perpetrators in order to safeguard their own institutions. No one draws the conclusion from this that Scouting or youth sports as such no longer have a right to exist, or that no youth organization should be allowed to say anything meaningful about education. We condemn the corrupt organization—rightly and harshly—without denying the value of what Scouting or sports mean to a child. In fact, those scandals have led countless other youth organizations to focus more sharply on child protection, not to the conclusion that youth work itself is suspect. Surely we shouldn’t ban *De Morgen* just because of *Pravda*?

That distinction gets lost in the outpouring of understandable outrage. Faith and Christianity are not synonymous with that one Catholic institution, and certainly not with its many good members. They are broad categories encompassing an enormous diversity of communities and traditions that are separate from this specific history. Anyone who uses the structural failings of a single institution to silence an entire category is engaging in intellectual exclusion. The Catholic Church, too, is greater than its failing leaders and perpetrators.

Why a Moral Monoculture Is Dangerous

If we assume that moral authority can come from only one source, or that only one secular morality can hold sway in the public sphere, we open the door to a dangerous monoculture. History teaches us that such “pensée unique”—whether packaged as a state religion or an authoritarian secular regime—stifles every form of pluralism. A society without a shared morality does not exist. The question is not whether moral values should exist, but how we shape them together. It is precisely here that diversity should be our starting point, not the exclusion of religious voices.

After all, what makes us vulnerable as a society today is not an excess of shared morality, but a lack of it. We are in danger of becoming a collection of individuals who focus solely on their own autonomy and regard personal standards as the only norm. Living together requires community, a unifying force, and shared values. Despite everything that has gone wrong historically, religion still holds that potential for millions of people.

A warning for every leader

I am not writing this as a detached observer. As a bishop within a religious tradition very different from the Catholic hierarchy, I myself bear responsibility. That is precisely why this discussion affects me on two levels. I know what is expected of a leader, and I see the dynamics within a faith community from the inside. That responsibility is never a free pass; it is a constant reminder. Anyone entrusted with a position of spiritual trust loses their authority the moment they betray that trust.

The institutional failure exposed by the Vangheluwe case reminds us that any institution that betrays its own mission must be held accountable and must dare to undergo radical change . That is what faith should bring about: an examination of conscience and restoration.

The leaders and structures of a particular church may lose their social credibility. Sometimes that is painfully justified. But faith itself—as a living source of inspiration to do good—does not lose that value as a result. Anyone who claims otherwise confuses the shadow of a failing organization with the light of the message itself.