DENVER (CO)
Crux
February 14, 2021
By John L. Allen Jr.
Rome – This week the name of the late Father Werenfried van Straaten, a Dutch priest who founded “Aid to the Church in Need” in 1952 to aid persecuted Christians, was added to the distressingly long list of founders of new entities in the Catholic Church who’ve turned out to have feet of clay.
The German newspaper Die Zeit published an article on Wednesday indicating that a Vatican-sponsored review of Aid to the Church in Need in 2009 concluded that serious concerns surrounded van Straaten in several areas, including a charge of attempted rape in 1973 against a 20-year-old employee of the organization.
Other concerns included “excesses in lifestyle,” meaning abuse of alcohol and an overly indulgent zeal for food, as well as “considerable deficits in personnel management.”
After the piece appeared in Die Zeit, Aid to the Church in Need acknowledged the charges and confirmed that it had paid almost $20,000 to the alleged victim of the 1973 assault to compensate her for both her suffering and also lost pension contributions from her time as an employee.
The report further indicated that the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy at the time, Italian Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, ordered that the charges against van Straaten not be made public, on the grounds that the good name of Aid to the Church in Need shouldn’t be sullied by the failures of its founder.
Also this week, famed Italian Father Enzio Bianchi, founder of the ecumenical community of Bose, was ordered out of the monastery and sent to another property owned by the community after a Vatican-sponsored investigation found a “series of concerns” regarding Bianchi, including alleged abuses of authority inside Bose.
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