Gaia Pianigiani

A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Brussels-Mechelen, which Danneels had led for three decades, confirmed the death. No specific cause was given.

Danneels, who spoke several languages, was considered a progressive in Roman Catholic leadership, supporting a greater role for women in the church and a less rigid policy against contraception. He believed that HIV-positive people should be able to use condoms rather than risk transmitting the virus.

Years before Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world by retiring in 2013, Danneels had raised the possibility of popes retiring in advanced age or when their health deteriorated.

He was a target of conservative critics in his 29 years as president of the Belgian Bishops’ Conference. They complained that he had not done enough to thwart growing secularization in Belgium, whose government has approved same-sex marriage, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia and experiments on human embryos.

Danneels’ reputation was badly hurt shortly after he retired in 2010, when Belgian newspapers released recordings of a secretly taped conversation in which he was heard urging a victim of serial sexual abuse by a bishop to say nothing about it for a year, until the bishop — the victim’s own uncle — could retire. The bishop was Roger Vangheluwe, who was 73 at the time.

On the tapes, which church authorities confirmed were accurate, Danneels told the victim: “The bishop will resign next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait. I don’t think you’d do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.”

The cardinal was then heard warning the man against trying to blackmail the church and suggested that he accept a private apology from the bishop and not drag “his name through the mud.”

The victim responded, “He has dragged my whole life through the mud, from 5 until 18 years old,” and asked, “Why do you feel sorry for him and not for me?”

After the tapes’ release, police interrogated Danneels for hours and raided his home and the church’s offices in Mechelen, searching for indications that archdiocese officials might have concealed evidence of pedophilia.

The nephew ultimately exposed Vangheluwe, saying he had been abused for 13 years. The bishop resigned in disgrace. A year later he admitted to having abused a second nephew.

The revelations prompted hundreds of people to come forward, claiming that they, too, had been victims of priests, plunging the Belgian church into deep crisis, one being replicated in countries throughout Europe as reports of sex abuse spread.

No legal action was taken against Danneels, but the scandal left him tarnished as having tried to protect a sex offender.

The episode was not the first time he had had to deal with sex-abuse charges against members of the clergy. In the late 1990s, he established an independent commission to support the victims of abusive priests after police had verified the allegations of a 12-year-old against a pedophile priest. The archdiocese had to pay damages to the boy.

Godfried Maria Jules Danneels was born on June 4, 1933, in Kanegem, in rural western Belgium, the oldest of six children. His parents were schoolteachers.

He studied theology at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Louvain in 1954 and received his doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1961. He started teaching theology at the Flemish Catholic University of Louvain in 1977.

He was ordained a priest in 1957 and named the spiritual director of the main seminary of Bruges two years later. Pope Paul VI made him bishop of Antwerp in 1977 at age 44. He became archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels in 1979. Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal in 1983.

Danneels was an adviser to the Vatican secretary of state and helped oversee the appointments of bishops. He was on a rare diplomatic mission to China in April 2005 when John Paul II died, and he had to cancel a meeting with the deputy premier to return to Rome.

After Benedict’s retirement, Danneels was an active supporter of Francis, whose election he had long favored.

“Years before the last conclave, he told me that the church needed a Francis as head of the church,” Geert De Kerpel, spokesman of the Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels, said in a phone interview.

After his retirement, Danneels spent his time with friends and acquaintances, praying and reading literature, “what he held most dear to his heart,” said Cardinal Jozef De Kesel, his successor as archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, in a statement announcing his death.

He is survived by two sisters, a brother and many nieces and nephews.

In a telegram of condolence, Francis called Danneels a “zealous pastor” who had been “attentive to the challenges of the contemporary Church.”

Godfried Danneels, liberal cardinal tainted by sex scandal, dies at 85

ROME — Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium, a liberal supporter of Pope Francis and a former Vatican adviser whose long pastoral career was damaged in a sex-abuse scandal after his retirement, died March 14 at his home in Mechelen, north of Brussels. He was 85.

His daughter, Nina Gardner, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

While his profile was probably highest when he was posted to Rome, Gardner was also an adviser to Democratic presidential candidates and a distinguished law professor at Columbia University.

One candidate he advised was Jimmy Carter, who on becoming president in 1977 appointed Gardner to the Rome post.

Until then, U.S. officials had long supported Italy’s Christian Democrats, who dominated politics there, and kept the door closed to leftist parties. It was the height of the Cold War, and Washington was worried about communist influence in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy.

The administration had loosened its position on Eurocommunism when it sent Gardner to Italy but gave him instructions not to be the first one to articulate this new policy.

When reporters asked him on his arrival what his policy on the Italian Communist Party was going to be, Gardner responded with something more creative than a “no comment.”

As he recalled in his 2005 memoir, “Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War,” he answered, diplomatically, with an old Venetian proverb, “Prima de parlar, tasi” — “Before you speak, be quiet.”

At the time, the Communist Party had become the second-largest political force in Italy, a member of NATO, and was close to entering the government. One mission of the U.S. Embassy in Rome was to gain a deeper understanding of Italy’s Communists and their intentions.

These were the so-called Years of Lead in Italy, when extremists on the left, mainly the Red Brigades, terrorized the country with bombings and killings of politicians, businessmen and other public figures, while right-wing extremists murdered citizens in attacks on banks, train stations and public gatherings.

In 1978, amid intense political maneuvering in Italy to allow the Communists and other opposition parties to enter the government, Gardner was called back to Washington for consultations.

The Carter administration then issued a statement stressing opposition to Communist participation in Western European governments.

Yet in tandem with such calls, the Carter administration softened visa restrictions for Italy’s Communist Party officials, including Giorgio Napolitano, who was later president of Italy. In 1977, the Italian government allowed the party’s newspaper, L’Unità, to open a bureau in New York.

And it invited prominent Italian leftists, including the filmmaker Federico Fellini, the writer Alberto Moravia and the painter Renato Guttuso, to embassy functions.

In 1979, in a diplomatic accomplishment that many credited to Gardner, the United States secured Italy’s agreement to accept placing new U.S. missiles there as part of NATO’s program to modernize nuclear forces.

Italy was the first European country to do so, despite having the largest Communist Party in the West, and Germany followed. The leader of the Italian Socialist Party, with whom Gardner was on good terms, also supported the decision, despite the party’s having once rejected NATO.

After leaving Rome in 1981, Gardner advised Al Gore on foreign policy during his 1988 presidential campaign and Bill Clinton in his campaign in 1992. Under Clinton, Gardner was ambassador to Spain from 1993 to 1997.

Richard Newton Gardner was born in Manhattan on July 9, 1927, to Samuel and Ethel (Alias) Gardner. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker.

After military service with the Army News Service in New Jersey, he studied international economics at Harvard College and received a law degree from Yale in 1951. A Rhodes scholar, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University in 1954. His doctoral thesis became a book, “Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: The Origins and the Prospects of Our International Economic Order” (1969).

In 1956 he married Danielle Luzzatto, who had been born into a Jewish family in Venice and had fled Italy — to Switzerland, France and later the United States — under Benito Mussolini’s racial laws of 1938. She died in 2008.

In addition to his daughter, a lecturer in international law at Johns Hopkins University and director of a consulting firm, he is survived by his son, Anthony, who was the U.S. ambassador to the European Union during the Obama administration; and three grandchildren.

Gardner began teaching international law at Columbia University in 1954. In the early 1960s he was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under President John F. Kennedy. He returned to academia between his diplomatic postings.

At Columbia, he taught a popular seminar, “Legal Aspects of U.S. Foreign Economic Policy.” On the first day of the seminar, his students were asked to jot down their mid- and long-term career aspirations, notes that Gardner kept and later used when politicians or government officials sought his advice on a new hire. The seminar lasted from 1955 to 2012, when Gardner retired.

Gardner was a strong believer in the study of foreign cultures and languages, which he called “public diplomacy.”

“We are denying our foreign policy one of our greatest sources of strength as a nation — our system of higher education and our rich pluralistic culture,” he wrote in a New York Times commentary in 1983. “We have also shamefully neglected the education of our young people in foreign languages and foreign area studies. All this seems to me the height of folly.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/obituaries/richard-gardner-dead.html" id="b46b78a2-a922-37b3-af22-7e9e011b683e">The New York Times</a>.

Richard Gardner, who in the late 1970s served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy in a period of political violence there and concern in Washington about the Italian Communist Party’s growing strength, died Feb. 16 at his home in New York. He was 91.

Richard Gardner, Cold War Envoy to an Italy in Strife, Dies at 91

Politics

Local

World

News

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Sports 

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

Explore categories

Checkout our authors for the latest content across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone |  Pulse Uganda

Authors | Pulse Uganda

| Pulse Uganda

Read the latest news across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulse Uganda

Breaking News & Top Stories | Pulse Uganda

Read the latest news across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone. 

Pulse Uganda

Search for the latest content across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulse Uganda

Search Results | Pulse Uganda

Watch the latest videos across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulse Uganda

Gaia Pianigiani

Articles written by the author

Godfried Danneels, liberal cardinal tainted by sex scandal, dies at 85

Richard Gardner, Cold War Envoy to an Italy in Strife, Dies at 91