Questions swirling about a Nobel Prize-winning bishop's past are at the center of a growing clergy sexual abuse scandal.
FILE - Nobel Peace Prize laureate, East Timor bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo displays his certificate and medal during the Nobel ceremony at the Oslo townhall, on Dec. 10, 1996. Belo has been accused in a Dutch magazine article of sexually abusing boys in East Timor in the 1990s, rocking the Catholic Church in the impoverished nation and forcing officials at the Vatican and his religious order to scramble to provide answers.
A spotlight fell on Portuguese church authorities, as well as the Vatican, last week when the Holy See’s sex abuse office confirmed a Dutch media report that in 2020 it had secretly sanctioned Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the revered independence hero of East Timor, a small former Portuguese colony in East Asia. Belo, who has been living in Portugal, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.
Ornelas, who presides over Portugal’s world-famous shrine at Fatima, has denied any misconduct or wrongdoing and has promised to cooperate with any investigation, but the inquiry added to the pressure on Portuguese church authorities. The scandals have come against a backdrop of revelations published by a lay committee looking into historic church sexual abuse cases in Portugal. Since January, it has unearthed around 400 alleged cases. Previously, church officials had said they knew of only a handful of cases.
The Vatican prohibited Belo from having contact with minors or with East Timor, based on misconduct allegations that arrived in Rome in 2019.
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