BRUSSELS >> On a brutal day for the frail and aging Pope Francis, the king of Belgium, its prime minister and the rector of the Catholic university that invited him here all ripped into the institution he heads for a spectrum of sins: for covering up cases of clergy sex abuse and being far behind the times on embracing women and the LGBTQ+ community in the church.

And that was all before Francis met with the people most harmed by the Catholic Church in Belgium — the men and women who were raped and molested by priests as children and the single mothers who were forced to give up their newborns for adoption to avoid the stigma of raising them out of wedlock.

Through it all, Francis expressed his remorse, begged forgiveness and promised to do everything possible to make sure such abuses never occur again. “This is our shame and humiliation,” he said in his first public remarks on Belgian soil.

Francis has visited countries with wretched legacies of church wrongdoing before. He made a sweeping apology to Irish abuse survivors in 2018 and traveled to Canada in 2022 to atone for the church-run residential schools that traumatized generations of Indigenous peoples.

But it is hard to think of a single day where the leader of the 1.3 billion-strong Catholic Church had been subjected to such strong, public criticisms from a country’s highest institutional figures — royalty, government and academia — over the church’s crimes and its seemingly tone deaf responses to the demands of today’s Catholics.

Luc Sels, the rector of Leuven Catholic University, the 600th anniversary of which was the official reason for Francis’ trip to Belgium, told the pope that the abuse scandals had so weakened the church’s moral authority that it would do well to reform, to the point of ordaining women as priests, if it wants to regain its relevance.

“Why do we tolerate the major differences between men and women in a church that, de facto, depends so heavily on women?” Sels asked the pope. “Wouldn’t the church be a warmer place if women were given a prominent place, the most prominent place, also in priesthood?”

“Wouldn’t the church in our region gain moral authority if it were not so rigid in its approach to gender and diversity issues? And if it did, like the university does, open its arms more to the LGBTQ+ community?” he asked.

The comments certainly reflected the views of Belgium and more progressive European society. But they also reflected the reform-minded church in this part of the world that Francis has embraced, to a degree, in seeking to make the universal church more relevant and responsive to Catholics today.