Dutch Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal

This video from the USA is called Pedophile priest crime victims support US Attorney investigation of Cardinal Roger Mahony in LA.

From De Volkskrant, originally founded as the daily of the Roman Catholic trade unions in the Netherlands, today:

Dutch monks accused of sexual abuse …

For the first time in the Netherlands, monks of the order of Salesian Fathers of Don Bosco are accused publicly of sexual abuse going on for years.

From Dutch daily NRC:

Child sex abuse in Dutch Catholic Church revealed

Published: 26 February 2010 17:28 | Changed: 26 February 2010 17:39

Amid the high-profile child sexual abuse scandals in the United States and other European countries, the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands has remained unsullied. A joint investigation by NRC Handelsblad and Radio Netherlands Worldwide shows this is unjustified.

By Robert Chesal for Radio Netherlands Worldwide and Joep Dohmen for NRC Handelsblad

Janne Geraets, now 57, suffered repeated sexual abuse from the age of 11 at the hands of a priest at the Roman Catholic school where he was a boarder. His ordeal began in 1964, at the Don Rua monastery in the town of ‘s-Heerenberg in the east of the Netherlands. He was being trained by the Salesian Fathers of Don Bosco, in the hope of one day becoming a missionary. After a party, one of the priests lured Janne to the infirmary under the pretext of giving him medicine to ease his sore throat. “All of a sudden he was right up against me,” Geraets recalled. “He unzipped his trousers and forced my hand inside. I was in a state of utter confusion.”

See also here.

By Gary McLennon in Australia:

Redfern’s radical priest

27 February 2010

Ted Kennedy, Priest of Redfern By Edmund Campion, David Lovell Publishing, 2009 201 pages, $24.95

This fine book is valuable on two accounts. Firstly, in telling the life of the radical priest Ted Kennedy who was, using Dostoevsky’s words, “a wholly good man”, and secondly as an introduction to the alternative church within official Roman catholicism.

Edmund Campion implies that to understand Kennedy one must recognise this oppositional church.

This book is published at a time of right-wing triumphalism within catholicism. The recent sacking of the Brisbane radical priest, Peter Kennedy (no relation), following complaints from a reactionary provocateur, shows the pressures on the champions of the Second Vatican Council.