How a Catholic religious order dedicated to protecting children failed them

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Father Luk Delft is accused of abusing at least two other children in the Central African Republic while working at a key position in Caritas.

(CNN) - A pedophile priest was sent to work for a charity that helps vulnerable families in a country in Africa, even though his religious order knew he had been convicted of abusing children in Europe, according to a CNN investigation.

Father Luk Delft is accused of abusing at least two other children in the Central African Republic while working in a key position in Caritas, the Catholic charitable organization.

The 50-year-old Belgian priest was only removed from office after CNN reported new accusations against him to his superiors in the order of the Salesians of Don Bosco, founded specifically to protect children.

The Salesians covered up the abuse of Delft for years, moved it from one post to another and sent it to work in some of the most troubled places in the world.

Despite the accusations against him, and having been convicted of abuse, he was allowed to maintain a prominent profile, including receiving communion at a Mass officiated by Pope Francis in the Vatican this year.

Delft's case also raises questions about the background research process in one of the largest Catholic non-governmental organizations, and is released at a time when the Catholic Church tries to recover from decades of scandals over sexual abuse starring members of the clergy.

Alban Alain, now 17, and his family, told CNN that Delft sexually abused the teenager on several occasions when they met at a camp for internally displaced people in Kaga-Bandoro, in the Central African Republic, four years ago.

"It's horrible what he did to me," said Alban, who was 13 when the alleged abuse began.

"It's not normal what he did to my son," Onono Alain, the boy's father, told CNN.

Leaning awkwardly against the wall of his family's adobe hut in the north of the Central African Republic, Alban became nervous when we showed him a photograph of Delft.

After a long silence, he said: "Luk." When we asked him what he knew the priest, he said quietly: "He is my friend."

"He bought me clothes and gave me money," he added. "We were always together."

"They brought him here as director of Caritas and he was entrusted with the distribution of aid," said Onono. "However, he took advantage of his position to sodomize my son."

Abuse in a safe place

Alban and his family are Catholics in a country divided by years of bloody clashes between Muslims and Christians.

“When the Seleka militia took over our district, we had to leave,” said Onono.

The family fled across the river to Kaga-Bandoro to escape the violence.

Along the way, like hundreds of thousands of Christians in the country, Alain's family sought refuge in Catholic Church facilities. When they arrived at the IDP camp, they thought they had found a safe place. But his painful experience was far from over.

Alban seemed extremely traumatized by the treatment he received from Delft.

"When I think about it, it's not good for me," Alban said. “It makes me very stressed, even when I am with my friends. I often cry. ”

Unable to keep talking, he leaned on his father while Onono explained more about Delft's abuse.

"I think he did it many times because he was always with my son," he said. “When my son came home, I had money, like 2,000 or 3,000 CFA (Central African francs, equivalent to 3 to 5 dollars).”

“The last time my son came back and told me what happened… He doesn't lie to me. I know it".

Alain said that the largest amount of money Delft gave his son was 10,000 Central African francs, equivalent to about $ 17.

In the same camp, we met the father of another of Delft's alleged victims. "What he did with my son will remain forever in my memory," said the man, who asked CNN not to be identified.

Nor did he want to reveal all the details of the abuse to his son at the hands of the pedophile priest, but he asked the CNN team to tell Delft that "one day we will see him again, in court, and we will have a resolution."

"We expect justice," he insisted.

Predating vulnerable children

This was not the first time that Delft was accused of abusing boys.

He had already been convicted of sexual crimes and his superiors in the Salesian order knew it when he was offered the position in the Central African Republic.

Thousands of kilometers away, and more than a decade earlier, Delft had abused at least two children, one of 12 years and one of 13, when working as a bedroom monitor at the Salesian boarding school Don Bosco Sint-Denijs-Westrem, in the Belgian city of Ghent, in 2001.

The priest, then 31, was in charge of caring for the children. On the contrary, he abused them at their most vulnerable moment, stalking the bedroom at night and assaulting them while they slept.

Two men, whom CNN does not identify at their request, argue that Delft behaved improperly with them when they were children.

“We slept in a large room of 30 people, all […] were 12, 13 years old. Suddenly, at night, someone was trying to take my blanket off, ”Guillaume (not his real name) told CNN in Belgium. "I thought he was a boy who wanted to play, because we were sleeping next to each other."

"I woke up, jumped and ran after him because I wanted to know which child was attacking me," but the person was gone.

Guillaume is considered one of the lucky ones. From a difficult dream, he woke up every time the blanket was removed, before they could harm him. One of his companions was not so lucky.

A clock in the dark

"One night, I woke up because I felt something," Guillaume's classmate Benoit told CNN (it's not his real name) either. "I felt, or thought I felt someone was touching me, I didn't know what or who it was."

"The next day, I remember telling one of my best friends that I had a very strange dream in which they touched me in strange places," he recalled. “We laughed and said: 'Well, it's just a dream. We're in a bedroom, so nothing can happen to you. '”

"And then, the next night, I woke up again and realized that I was really awake ... I felt someone touching my legs and genitals," he added.

He says that then Delft had oral sex.

During breakfast, the next morning, Benoit shared his experience with Guillaume and other students in the cafeteria, and Benoit told them he had seen a distinctive watch.

Benoit recalled: “The boy next to me said: 'Hmm. I think I know the clock too. ' And he said: 'Hi Luk, what time is it?' And Luk raised his arm and I saw the clock and recognized him immediately. Then, I realized: this really happened, and it was Luk Delft. ”

Benoit and Guillaume denounced the abuse before Wim Hanssens, then deputy director of the boarding school.

Discovery and dismissal

"One of the students came to me and told me that Luk Delft was walking at night between the beds and caressing those children under the covers ... and that he also caressed his genitals," Hanssens told CNN. "A day later, another child came to tell me the same story."

Hanssens said he called Delft at his office immediately. “I showed him what those children told me on paper. At first, he said: 'It's not for much, I just stroked them.' But when he could read that he touched the genitals of these children, he confessed… And at that moment, I told him to leave immediately. ”

Hanssens added that his decision to dismiss Delft was confirmed in a meeting with the Salesian provincial, the local head of the order in Ghent and the lawyer for the order.

Hanssens said after that he heard about Delft only once. It was when the priest wrote asking him to return the pillow and some books he had lent to one of the victims. Hanssens was surprised by the boldness of this petition and said he never sent it to the victim.

Hanssens believes that his decision to act as a whistleblower, reporting the abuses of Delft and other priests, played against him within the Salesian order, and says he was later forced to leave school in Ghent and work more than 160 kilometers from his house.

Father Carlo Loots, Salesian superior of Delft in Belgium, says that Hanssens was treated correctly and that the order thanked him "for not having shied away from giving these difficult messages."

Benoit says that later his mother was invited to a meeting with the Salesians.

“They wanted to know if we would file an official lawsuit, something she would have done, but they told her about how traumatic it was for people to go to court, which could take several years, several investigations, several interviews, and that it was not healthy for a 13 year old boy, ”said Benoit.

"I know that my parents and the parents of other children somehow believed that story," he said, adding that his mother "does not want to consider it as pressure, but in fact it is."

“I don't think anyone wants to subject that to a 13-year-old boy, so they kept the story and left it there. And the Salesians easily escaped from that, ”added Benoit.

Child pornography

The Salesians did not report the allegations against Delft to the police. He was quietly transferred to another of the order's schools in Belgium, Don Bosco Sint-Pieters-Woluwe, where he worked as an educational coordinator.

Loots says the move was made on the premise that Delft should not have "no direct pedagogical contact with young people."

Despite this, in 2008, Delft was sent on a school trip with children from the sister school of Don Bosco Sint-Denijs-Westrem, to Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The following year, the priest was surprised with child pornography on a work laptop.

Loots told CNN that the superiors of the Salesians in Rome were informed of this discovery and kept abreast of Delft's activities. The head of the Salesian order in Rome declined the CNN interview requests.

But even so, Delft was not reported to the authorities. On the contrary, they moved it again, this time to work with DMOS-COMIDE, the Salesian NGO in Belgium.

In 2010, he was sent to Haiti after the earthquake to join the humanitarian relief tasks of the organization there.

Loots says that it is a difficult situation for Salesians to deal with abusers like Delft.

"In most cases, it is impossible for them to stay in the community or where they live or work," Loots explained. "You have to get them out right away and, since the Salesians work with young people, there aren't many alternatives."

Prohibited contact with children

Delft's crimes did not attract the attention of the Belgian authorities until 2010, when a former school colleague denounced the abuse, nine years after it happened.

The prosecutor in the case told CNN that he suspected that Delft had abused other children at school, but that no other victim officially reported him.

When the case reached the courts in Ghent in 2012, Delft was convicted of two counts of child abuse and possession of child pornography, according to the prosecutor.

But since the Salesians had encouraged him before to ask for help to treat his pedophilia (and this was taken into account by the authorities), he was sentenced to 18 months in prison, and suspended for three years.

He was ordered to undergo therapy at a center for sex offenders and forbade him to have contact with children for 10 years.

According to the ruling, that prohibition should have continued until 2022.

But one year after his conviction, Delft was given an important position in Caritas that put him in touch with some of the world's most vulnerable children.

Loots and Lucas Van Looy, bishop of Ghent, said Delft's initial transfer to the Central African Republic was approved by the Salesians and that it happened with prior knowledge from the Belgian probation committee, according to an email provided to CNN. But for Delft, destiny in the Central African Republic meant that he would return to work near children and with little supervision. This gave him opportunities to violate the restrictions imposed by the court, and the latest accusations against Delft suggest that he did so.

UNICEF has described the Central African Republic as one of the worst places in the world for children. The peace agreement there is maintained in a very precarious manner and the UN forces are on constant alert.

As director of the local operations of Caritas, Delft was in charge of the organization's work in more than 120 parishes throughout the country, including the care of children and families forced to leave their homes due to violence.

Photos published on the Caritas website and on Delft's personal Facebook page from 2015 show the priest interacting with children in the Central African Republic, in apparent direct violation of the terms of his sentence, which extends this prohibition to any part of the world.

Delft continued traveling and working at high levels within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, participating in the celebrations during the visit of Pope Francis to Bangui, the capital of the country, in 2015, and appearing in a promotional video of Caritas at the beginning of this year. In May 2019, he was filmed receiving communion a few meters from the pontiff during a trip to the Vatican.

Andrew Azzopardi, head of protection for Caritas, considered unacceptable that, given his background, Delft would have played such an important role within the charity.

"No one with a conviction like Father Luk's should have access to children, and nobody like that should be in a position of authority like Caritas's director," he told CNN. "Normally, someone with such a conviction is not in such a position."

Father Carlo Loots said the Salesians were "naive" in sending Delft to the Central African Republic.

"It's a bit cynical, probably, to give him a new opportunity and that position in Kaga-Bandoro and (hope) that the bishop of Kaga-Bandoro would take care of him." The bishop of Kaga-Bandoro at that time, Albert Vanbuel, was a Belgian Salesian.

But Loots insists that the organization had few alternatives. "It's one of the most difficult questions when you face an abuser," he said. "We can't give them a shot, even if we wanted to ... what alternative do we have left?"

“At that time - Loots remembers - we are looking for the best possible alternative with the least risk of repeating his behavior. What you do is confront this, and think about the best scenario, but that wasn't enough. ”

Benoit was not "surprised" that Delft had worked with children in the Central African Republic, despite the Belgian court order prohibiting him: "I saw photos of him surrounded by young children, he was smiling and I recognized the smile on his face" .

Without remorse

When CNN confronted Delft in his Caritas office in Bangui for the abuse, he showed no remorse.

Surprised, he interrupted his meeting when he saw our camera, got up and tried to throw us out of the room, saying, "No, no, no."

Frowning, he seemed not to recognize the name of Alban Alain, and when asked if he had anything to say about the allegations of abuse against him, he said, "No, nothing."

Shaking his head, with an awkward smile on his face, he watched the CNN team leave the building.

Delft was called to Belgium at the end of June, after the CNN investigation. The Salesians say that he is now "under supervision" at the residence of the order in Sint-Pieters-Woluwe. The residence has a school on its campus, CNN learned.

The police and ecclesiastical authorities in Belgium have initiated investigations on Delft based on the findings of CNN. They said they cannot comment on whether or not they will face trial or punishment for their alleged actions in the Central African Republic because the investigations are ongoing.

Nor did they want to comment on the agreement that allowed Delft to travel to the African country despite his conviction and the prohibition of working with children.

The Salesians say they are investigating Delft's case internally, but it is not clear if this could lead to his removal.

For now, Delft remains a member of the Salesian order.

For Guillaume, it is obvious what should happen now.

"Someone like Luk Delft is sick and needs treatment," he said. "Putting Luk Delft in prison will not help this man or other children because he will get out of jail and do the same."

"To those who must condemn, the true criminals," Guillaume added, "are the people who move Luk Delft from one place to another ... because they are people with common sense and know perfectly what Luk Delft does, what he has been doing and what what he will do in the future ”.

Regarding the victims of the priest in the Central African Republic, Alban simply says: "I want him to appear before the courts."

Abuses of priests