Dutch castration claims
March 23, 2012
The Dutch parliament has called for an investigation into reports that Roman Catholic clerics castrated young males in their care during the 1950's. The claims were made in a Dutch newspaper and cast doubt over the findings of a recent commission charged with investigating sexual crimes within the Church.
According to the NRC Handelsblad newspaper, at least 10 young men in Roman Catholic institutions were castrated in order to "cure" homosexuality and as a punishment for accusing clergy of sexual abuse. The report focused on the case of 20-year-old Henk Heithuis whose testicles were removed in 1956 after he told police about child abuse in the Harreveld boarding school in the east of the country.
The NRC's investigative reporter Joep Dohmen and Robert Chesal, a journalist with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, have been instrumental in exposing clerical sexual abuse in the Netherlands. In an interview with DW, Chesal said castrations were carried out at the Church's psychiatric facilities.
"It looks like there were 9 or 10 other cases. But this may be the beginning of something much, much bigger," Chesal said, adding that the findings were based on statements from victims, legal documents, private letters and hospital records.
"We are finding out as we do our research that there were many castrations and they were kept secret within Roman Catholic medical circles in the 1950's."
A cover-up?
Chesal said it was known that the Church carried out castrations to "cure" homosexuality, but that "it was kept secret that young men's testicles had been removed as retribution for having reported abuse."
Thus, he suspects a cover-up. "The chairman of the Harreveld boarding school was a rising star in politics and became Prime Minister only seven years after the castration of Henk Heithuis took place."
Dutch politicians are now calling for an investigation into the castration cases, which have cast into doubt the findings of a commission which was set up to probe allegations of clerical abuse. The Deetman Commission, which issued its report last December, identified 800 perpetrators of sexual crimes within the Catholic Church between 1945 and 2010. It said tens of thousands of children were abused. But the commission did not investigate the alleged castrations, citing insufficient evidence.
Dutch are shocked
Roman Catholic bishops in the Netherlands have said they will cooperate with any additional inquiry into clerical abuse. The Dutch public, however, is outraged.
“We are seeing an outcry which I think may be greater than what we saw two years ago when the scandal first broke,” said Chesal. “People thought last December with the Commission's report that all the ugly truth had come to the surface. Now they're finding out that things have actually been withheld from them.”
“The anger”, Chesal added, “is not only at the abuse but at the cover-up of the abuse. And it's not only about an old cover-up - it's about a cover-up in 2010 and 2011. And that's unacceptable to the entire nation.”
Author: Helen Seeney
Editor: Gabriel Borrud