National Catholic Reporter
Jan. 03, 2012
By John L Allen Jr
Global
Two leading politicians in the Netherlands, both from conservative parties, have called for the resignations of Catholic bishops in the wake of a damning report on sexual abuse in the Dutch church.
The country’s prime minister, Mark Rutte, also announced that his cabinet is considering lifting a statute of limitations to allow criminal prosecutions. A complaint has already been filed with the public prosecutor’s office against a former bishop of the Rotterdam diocese, Philippe Bär. An attorney representing alleged victims has charged Bär with covering up abuse during his tenure from 1983 to 1993.
Meanwhile, an influential Catholic commentator in Italy has rejected suggestions that the revelations amount to an indictment of the liberal spirit of Dutch Catholicism following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
Released on Dec. 16, the report found that somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Dutch children suffered abuse by Catholic personnel, ranging from unwanted sexual advances to rape, during the period of 1945 to 2010. A commission sponsored by the Catholic bishops and religious orders of Holland produced the report.
On Dec. 17, Holland’s deputy prime minister, Maxime Verhagen, himself a Catholic, said the church has been “profoundly damaged,” and bishops should consider resigning. Verhagen is a member of the Christian Democratic Appeal Party, a center-right faction seen as friendly to the church.
Twelve days later, the leader of the Reformed Political Party, another conservative faction of Calvinist origins, argued on national television that a Catholic bishop should resign. Doing so, said Kees van der Staaij, would “send out a strong signal about how seriously the church takes the issue.”
Bishop Gerard de Korte of the Groningen-Leeuwarden diocese told a Dutch newspaper, “None of the current bishops was personally involved, otherwise resignations would have been appropriate.”
The commission studied 1,800 complaints involving the Catholic church, identifying 800 Catholic clergy, religious and lay workers accused of abuse. Roughly 105 are believed to still be alive.
The commission, led by a former government minister who’s a Protestant, faulted Catholic leaders for a “failure of oversight” and said the vast majority of complaints were never reported to police.
Archbishop Wim Eijk of Utrecht, speaking on behalf of the Catholic church, said the report “fills us with shame and sorrow.” A letter of apology was read at Masses across the country on Dec. 18, and the Dutch church has announced a compensation program for victims, with payments ranging from $6,500 to $130,000, depending on the kind of abuse suffered.
The report builds on what has already been an ugly year for the Dutch church, following a scandal that rocked the Salesian order.
In May, Dutch radio reported that a Salesian priest had been a board member of a lobbying group advocating sexual relationships between children and adults. The priest’s superior, Salesian Fr. Herman Spronck, seemed to defend him, telling Dutch radio that “only in a few cases do children suffer harm” from these relationships.
The Salesians quickly removed Spronck from his position.
In Catholic circles, some commentators have posited a link between the revelations and the famously progressive climate in Dutch Catholicism after Vatican II. In mid-December, Italian writer Giacomo Galeazzi argued that “the ‘liberal’ Catholic church is sinking as a result of the pedophilia scandal.”
Fr. Enzo Bianchi, leader of the renowned Italian monastic community of Bose, and a figure with strong Vatican ties, has challenged those assertions.
In a Dec. 23 essay, Bianchi noted that more than 80 percent of the complaints indentified in the Dutch report date to the period before Vatican II. Ideological speculation, Bianchi wrote, “doesn’t help anyone … certainly not the victims, and not the church.”
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CatholicCulture.org
03 January 2012
Political leaders in the Netherlands are pressing for the resignation of Catholic bishops after the release of a report showing widespread sexual abuse within the Church.
The 1,100-page report, issued in December, found that 800 priests and religious had been accused of abuse within a 40-year period. The report noted, however, that the rate of abuse within the Church was not notably different from that within other Dutch institutions.
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Dutch Church abused 1000’s of children
presstv.com
Sun Jan 1, 2012 2:31PM GMT
Wim Deetman, chairman of the Dutch investigating Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Roman Catholic church (file photo)
Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in Dutch Catholic institutions over the past 65 years by priests and other Roman Catholic religious figures, a new report says.
The report, which is based on a survey of more than 34,000 people, said it could identify 800 Catholic clergy and other church employees guilty of sexually abusing children in the 40 years from 1945 and that more than 100 perpetrators were still alive.
According to the probe, the abuse ranged from “unwanted sexual advances” to rape, while the number of victims who suffered abuse in church institutions likely lies somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000.
Dutch bishops apologized to the victims and said they were filled with “shame and sorrow” over the Commission’s findings, which was led by a former education minister Wim Deetman.
“The Dutch Catholic Church knew what was happening and tried to resolve the problem,” but the appropriate actions were never taken, Deetman told a press conference in The Hague.
Recently the Roman Catholic Church has been rocked by numerous revelations of child sexual abuse at the hands of priests around the world.
Investigations have shown that clerics have sexually abused children in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium in the past decades and that the church has often covered up the abuse, protecting pedophile priests.
In 2004, a criminal inquiry established there were 4,400 paedophile priests in the United States between 1950 and 2002, putting the number of their child victims at 11,000.
Ireland, one of the most staunchly Catholic countries in Europe, has seen a series of crises, leading Pope Benedict XVI to publicly rebuke its bishops for a “breakdown of trust”.
A total of 14,500 Irish children are reported to have been victims of abuse by clergy.
PG/JR