Dutch priests raped, castrated boys, government covered up

This video says about itself:

In recent months the Catholic Church has been rocked by scandal. After widespread accusations of child abuse by priests in Ireland, similar claims have begun emerging from other European nations including Austria and the Netherlands. Now criticism in Germany is intensifying especially after the revelations that the current Popes’ brother Georg Ratzinger knew about mistreatment of children in his choir, although he claims no knowledge of sexual abuses.

Here comes a translation from an article in Dutch daily De Limburger. Before any ultra-fanatic defender of Vatican policies on clerical sexual abuse starts ranting about it supposedly being all anti-Catholic conspiracies by Jews, Freemasons, atheists, Muslims or Protestants: De Limburger is a traditionally Roman Catholic daily in Limburg province, traditionally the most Roman Catholic province in the Netherlands.

Translation of the article by Paul Bots en Niki van der Naald in De Limburger today:

Inspectorate knew about castrations

While the government health inspectorate knew about it, institutions in Limburg and Brabant provinces during the nineteen fifties have performed unsolicited castrations on minor patients. Interview reports which this newspaper has read show that parents were not informed.

NRC Handelsblad reported last weekend that in 1956 in the Padua institution in Boekel an underage boy was castrated to cure his homosexuality.

That happened shortly after the boy had reported to the police that he had been a victim of sexual abuse in a [clergy-run] boarding school in Harreveld in Gelderland. The matter was reported to the Deetman committee which investigated sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The committee did nothing with that report.

The National Inspectorate for the Care of the Mentally Handicapped in the nineteen fifties knew about this. This is evident from the minutes of the meetings of the medical managers of the Limburg and Brabant Catholic mental asylums. This newspaper found those documents while it investigated the strikingly high mortality figures in St. Joseph mental institution in Heel village in the nineteen fifties. A representative of the inspectorate attended the meetings of the Limburg and Brabant physician directors.

In those meetings – which were held several times a year – castration was mentioned openly. The directors thought that parents of minors did not have to be informed in advance about castrations.

Castration of adults was supposed to require consent. However, in practice there was little evidence of voluntariness, as the interview reports show. The institutions assumed that the patients did not realize what they consented to anyway.

See also here.

USA: Why Didn’t Rick Santorum Denounce the Immoral Epidemic of Child Abuse in the Catholic Church? Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: “Santorum has run as a fundamentalist Catholic who actually said that he throws up when he watches the tape of John F. Kennedy, in his 1960 campaign, proclaiming the separation of church and state. Yet, in a radio interview, Santorum would not stand up on behalf of children – many of them now men and women who have suffered life-long trauma as a result of institutionalized sexual child abuse within his church. That’s not a moral leader; that’s an enabler of vile and unforgivable violations of the youngest among us”: here.

Codes of Silence and Child Abuse Cover-Ups: The Sick Underbelly of Institutions in the US. Nathalia Jaramillo, Truthout: “The codes of silence … are actively produced across institutional hierarchies, enmeshed within the overriding logic of profit over people and embedded in profound frames of intelligibility that further subordinate the dispossessed. The culture of silence that Superintendent Deasy speaks about should be investigated…. This should be a starting point, but from there, broader questions need to be asked about the overall cultural practices evident in school sites and further demands need to be made for the rights of the poor”: here.

A HISTORY OF GOVERNMENT-MANDATED STERILIZATION “‘People around here know me for being smart, for knowing how to fix a lot of things,’ he tells me the first time I meet him, not long before he shows me the paperwork that suggested he was unfit to father children. In 1948, when he was 14 years old, Willis Lynch was sterilized on the recommendation of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board, a state-run organization that targeted thousands of men and women for vasectomies, hysterectomies, salpingectomies (removal of the fallopian tubes), ovariectomies (removal of the ovaries), and even castrations.” [Longreads]