Dutch Catholic church accused of widespread sexual abuse cover-up | World news | The Guardian. The standard techniques of cover-up and concealment of clerical abuse of children was used extensively in the Netherlands, so a report in today's, Guardian claims.
Quoting a report in National Catholic Reporter, the report says that:
Over the course of 65 years, 20 of 39 Dutch cardinals, bishops and their auxiliaries “covered up sexual abuse, allowing the perpetrators to cause many more victims. Four [of them] abused children and 16 others allowed the transfer of paedophile priests who could have caused new victims in other parishes".
Most of these abusers have since died and the statute of limitations has expired in all cases.
Daphne van Roosendaa, speaking for the Dutch Catholic Church, confirmed at least part of the report and admitted that:
The names of several bishops correspond to those named in a report commissioned by the church in 2010.
Additional claims are being made by nrc.nl that:
The Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands financially dealt with a third of the sexual abuse of children, outside the official complaint procedure. As a result, 342 of the 1,045 cases do not reveal what happened and what financial compensation the Church paid out. This is shown by NRC research , based, among other things, on internal documents.
Until January 1 this year, 342 abuse cases were handled in private: 210 times via mediation and 132 times via a settlement, without a mediator.
This was despite the advice of the Deetman Committee, which investigated child abuse at the request of the Church, that "disclosure should be the cornerstone" when dealing with complaints. Once again the instinct of the Cardinals and bishops, some of whom were themselves active paedophiles, was to cover up and seek to protect the abusers and protect the Church from scandals and the public from knowing the true nature of the priests who were living in their communities, supposedly their moral and spiritual guides.
It was in the Netherlands that the Catholic Church developed a particularly brutal method for ensuring the silence of the victims of its clerics, in this case the brothers who taught at the Harreveld Catholic boys home. They castrated those who complained as an warning to others not to do the same.
What is often lost in these figures is the truly shocking scale of it. We are not seeing the odd few cases of a few rogue priests who slipped through the net, but hundreds and thousands of cases in almost all dioceses. We are also seeing evidence not only that the Church leadership was aware of it but saw it as potentially embarrassing but nothing much to worry about and certainly not worth taking radical action to prevent. In many cases there is active facilitation and connivance, as though it is seen a perk of the job.
Meanwhile, in the central Cantal region of France, a 64 year old Catholic priest has been charged with molesting four brothers, now aged between 3 and 17. Bishop Bruno Grua, in whose diocese the offences are alleged to have taken place, said his diocese is "shocked by these unspeakable acts".
And Pope Francis still maintains a strict code of omerta concerning the accusations by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that he knew of the abuses by Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, but removed the restriction Pope Benedict XIV had placed him under and promoted him to Cardinal. He seems to be standing by his astonishing claim last Tuesday that Satan is behind these revelations, implying that cover-up and concealment is defeating Satan.
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