Deceased Dutch Catholic bishop was child molester: commission

Tom Heneghan
Reuters
April 12, 2014

The Dutch Catholic Church, in a rare admission of guilt among senior clergy, has confirmed that a bishop who died last year had sexually abused two boys decades earlier.

The diocese of Roermond said a Church commission had found that accusations against former bishop Johannes Gijsen, dating back to his time as chaplain at a minor seminary from 1958 to 1961, were "well founded".

The admission came on Friday, the same day that Pope Francis made his first public plea for forgiveness for "all the evil" committed by priests who molested children, and said the Church had to do more to discipline wayward clerics.

Mea Culpa, a Dutch group supporting abuse victims, welcomed the Roermond statement. But it said the accusations had been made while Gijsen was alive, and noted critically that "complaints against living suspects are often declared unfounded".

Bishop Frans Wiertz, current head of Roermond diocese, said he accepted the commission's findings and "regrets the abuse and suffering inflicted on the victims". He has personally met the two men and apologized to them, he said.

The Church's statement put Gijsen, who headed the diocese in southeastern Netherlands from 1972 to 1993, among the few senior Catholic clergy worldwide found guilty of abuse.

Katholiek Nieuwsblad, the weekly that broke the story, said the commission found Gijsen had groped the two boys and forced one to perform oral sex.

Gijsen had been confronted with the oral sex accusation in 2011, but denied knowing his accuser. The commission reopened his case a week after Gijsen died because it received the second complaint of improper genital touching, the weekly said. It concluded that Gijsen's denial was not credible because the victim's family had said he used to visit them.

BISHOPS BLAMED

Gijsen was one of several strict conservative bishops whom the Vatican appointed in the Netherlands - often over the protests of priests and parishioners - to roll back the strongly reformist turn that the Church took there in the 1960s.

He officially stepped down as bishop of Roermond in 1993 on health grounds, but later served as bishop of the tiny Catholic community in Iceland from 1996 to 2007. An abuse commission there accused him of covering up molestation by another priest.

Few bishops have been accused of active abuse in the scandal, which has been rocking the Catholic Church for over two decades. Most of the prelates who have stepped down did so for covering up the misdeeds of their priests.

Two cardinals - Hans Hermann Groer of Vienna and Edinburgh's Keith O'Brien - quit in disgrace amid accusations of sexual misconduct with seminarians. A Belgian bishop, Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges, stepped down after admitting molesting his nephew.

The Vatican has been investigating sexual abuse allegations against Archbishop Josef Wesolowski, its former nuncio (ambassador) to the Dominican Republic, since last September. His whereabouts and the status of his case are not known.

Pope Francis, who has been criticised by victims' support groups for not taking a sufficiently strong stand against sexual abuse, last month named a high-level group including an Irish abuse victim to help fight sexual abuse in the Church.

That came after the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child accused the Church in February of systematically turning a blind eye to clerical sexual abuse of minors. The Vatican called its report "distorted" and "unfair".

Terry McKiernan, founder of the website BishopAccountability.org, which documents abuse cases, welcomed the pope's latest comments but said victims wanted to see Church leaders taken to task for allowing abuse to continue.

"The best thing he could have done today would have been to step up to the microphone and announce that he is beginning to remove bishops who have behaved criminally in keeping priests in ministries where they don't belong," he said.

Dutch bishops give Pope Francis a bleak picture of Catholic Church in decline

Tom Heneghan
Reuters
December 3, 2013

Dutch bishops visiting Rome this week have given Pope Francis a dramatic snapshot of the steep decline of Roman Catholicism in its European heartland.

Both Catholic and Protestant Christian ranks have shrunk dramatically across Europe in recent decades, and hundreds of churches have been sold off to be turned into apartments, shops, bars or warehouses.

In the Netherlands, churches have been closing at a rate of one or two a week. The bishops told the pope in Rome on Monday that about two-thirds of all Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands would have to be shut or sold by 2025, and many parishes merged, because congregations and finances were “in a long-term shrinking process”.

Their five-yearly report blamed a “drastic secularization” of society, although a critical group of Dutch lay Catholics said the scandal of sexual abuse of minors by priests, which has afflicted many Catholic dioceses around the world, had also driven many people away, as had the closures themselves.

The only bright spot for the Dutch church was the finding that the election of the popular Pope Francis in March appeared to have slowed the exodus this year.

Francis has made it his mission to restore the Church’s relevance with a message of simplicity and charity, although his parallel plan to open up its hidebound institutions may take years to make itself felt.

Cardinal Willem Eijk, head of the Dutch bishops’ conference, said that the bishops’ 90-minute meeting with the pope had examined the Dutch Church’s decline and the effects of the scandals that first came to light in 2010. Tens of thousands of children were abused by priests over decades, according to an independent inquiry, and the Church has apologized and begun paying large sums in damages.

More than 23,000 Catholics quit the Dutch Church in 2010, the peak of an exodus in which an average 18,000 have left each year since 2006. This year, however, only about 7,500 had left by October.

Catholicism is still the Netherlands’ largest faith, officially claiming 24 percent of the 16 million population. Next come the Protestant churches at 18 percent and Islam at 5 percent.

But Eijk told Vatican Radio that government estimates put the Catholic total at 16 percent, falling to 10 percent by 2020. And the bishops’ report said a mere 5.6 percent of those declared as Catholics actually went to church regularly.

Ad de Groot, a lay Catholic leader in Eijk’s archdiocese of Utrecht, said secularization and the sexual abuse crisis had prompted people to leave in the past. But now, the very plan to close churches is alienating the Catholics who are left, he said.

De Groot’s group acc uses the bishops of merging parishes without consulting those who are losing their local churches. “Many people are angry and disappointed,” he said. His group told the Vatican last week that half of practicing Catholics would drift away in coming years as their churches closed.

Pressure on Dutch church after report

John L. Allen, Jr

National Catholic Reporter

Jan. 3, 2012

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).

........

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.”

full article at <a href="http://ncronline.org/news/global/pressure-dutch-church-after-report">National Catholic Reporter  </a>

Thousands abused in Dutch Catholic institutions

MIKE CORDER Associated Press
THE HAGUE, Netherlands
December 16, 2011

Thousands of children suffered sexual abuse in Dutch Catholic institutions over the past 65 years, and church officials knew about the abuse but failed to adequately address it or help the victims, according to a long-awaited investigation released Friday.

Archbishop of Utrecht Wim Eijk apologized to victims on behalf of the entire Dutch Catholic organization and said the report "fills us with shame and sorrow."

The report said Catholic officials failed to tackle the widespread abuse, which ranged from "unwanted sexual advances" to serious sex abuse, in an attempt to prevent scandals. Abusers included priests, brothers, pastors and lay people who worked in religious orders and congregations, it said.

The investigation followed allegations of repeated incidents of abuse at one cloister that quickly spread to claims from Catholic institutions across the country, echoing similar church-related scandals around the world.

The suspected number of abuse victims who spent some of their youth in church institutions likely lies somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000, according to a summary of the report investigating allegations of abuse dating back to 1945.


.........

The commission was set up last year under the leadership of former government minister Wim Deetman, who said there could be no doubt church leaders knew of the problem.

"The idea that people did not know there was a risk ... is untenable," he said.

...........

Archbishop Eijk said victims would be compensated by a commission the Dutch church set up last month and which has a scale starting at euro5,000 ($6,500) and rising to a maximum of euro100,000 ($130,000) depending on the nature of the abuse.

He said he felt personally ashamed of the abuse. "It is terrible," he said.
.........

See full story at ABC news

(The same pattern appears in country after country. Can there be any doubt that this was a deliberate conscious policy of the hierarchy of the Church?When found out, they apologize, but does it mean anyting other than embarassment at being publicly revealed.)

Catholic church knew of abuse for decades

Dutch News
November 29, 2011

The Catholic church was aware of child abuse at orphanages and other institutions throughout the Netherlands as early as 1954, according to documents found by researchers in church archives.

Senior church officials have consistently claimed they were not aware of the abuse.

However, television current affairs show Altijd Wat reported on Monday night the church's council for child protection issued warnings about child abuse in church-run homes and boarding schools in 1959 and 1962.

Warnings

The warnings were sent to the authorities at 112 homes and residential schools.

The letters urged institution managers to be aware of the dangers of employing people who are 'unsuitable' to give leadership to children.

The 1959 circular, for example, says the child protection group was aware of a number of cases, 'with sad and serious outcomes'.

Monks

RTL news has discovered a warning made by a senior cleric in Tilburg in 1954 in which monks in Tilburg were told: 'be careful in how you relate to children and do not make your lives unhappy. Keep your hands to yourself.'

The documents shed new light on the church's claim not to have known about the widespread abuse of children living in church institutions.

Lawyer Martin de Witte, who is representing a number of victims, said the letters showed the church could no longer say it was not aware of the abuse and claim that the cases are now too old.

Scandal

'They knew exactly what was going on but decided to to nothing about it,' De Witte told the Volkskrant.

It is almost two years since the scandal broke in the Netherlands with revelations that three Catholic clerics from the Don Rua cloisters in 's Heerenberg, Gelderland, had abused at least three children in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since then, a government commission has received reports of almost 2,000 cases of abuse within religious institutions. A number of cases will be taken to court

The elderly priest and the diocese - simple case of right and wrong?

In caelo et in terra
Mark de Vries
Nov. 12, 2011

I’ve seen the story of the elderly priest who has been ordered to cease living with his girlfriend or be removed from the priesthood pop up in several international media, and while I usually don’t comment on such private matters, this fact is a reason to do so.

The priest, Father Jan Peijnenburg (who is not the emeritus archivist of the diocese, who has the same name), is 81 years old and has been living with his female friend for the past 46 years. Both are pictured to the left. Newspapers make of this friend his girlfriend, which would seem likely, because Fr. Peijnenburg is also the author of several recent leaflets in which he agitates against priestly celibacy, leaflets which he mailed to numerous people, the diocese claims.

Fr. Peijnenburg seems fairly resigned. If it’s a choice between his living with a woman or the priesthood, the priesthood will loose, he has said.

I can understand both parties in this case. The diocese is right when they say they can’t allow one priest to do what other priests are forbidden to do, even more so when this priest publically agitates against Church law. On the other hand, Fr. Peijnenburg has been ordered to make a change in a life that he has led for 46 years. That’s half a lifetime in any reckoning. Has the diocese truly been aware only since the leaflets have been mailed round? If so, it points to a pretty weak awareness of what its priests are up to. If not, why wait almost five decades before doing something?

Personally, without knowing the details, I think it would suit the diocese to be a little less rigorous in this matter. They are essentially right, but they have left it until virtually the very last minute to do something. But, the same goes for Fr. Peijnenburg. I can’t imagine he didn’t know what the laws of celibacy for priests entail. And if he disagrees with them, he should have drawn conclusions from that opinion. He has no reason to act all defiant when the diocese finally figures out what’s going on.

The Diocese of ‘s Hertogenbosch seems to be cracking down hard on all sorts of errors and abuses, and it is about time it did. But since the diocese took a long time to do so, and thus allowed the errors and abuses to develop and continue (I’m also looking at San Salvator, for example), it would do well to get on a slightly smaller high horse and adopt a more pastoral attitude in dealing with these cases. But then again, the very same goes for the people who commit the errors and abuses…

Photo credit: Brabants Dagblad

Clerical sexual abuse in the Netherlands

So first there was this Nov. 2010 story from the BBC about sexual abuse charges in the Netherlands involving Salesians, including a former bishop. The head of the Salesians in the Netherlands, Fr. Herman Spronck declined to comment...........

A Dutch Roman Catholic bishop who died in 2003 abused a boy while serving as a priest at a monastery after the war, Dutch media report.
Jan ter Schure, who served as bishop of Den Bosch until 1998, is said to have been one of seven priests involved in abusing the boarding school pupil.
Church documents show the victim was paid compensation for "emotional damages" after ter Schure's death.
The religious order involved paid him 16,000 euros (£13,500, $21,000).
The abuse occurred at the Don Rua monastery in Ugchelen between 1948 and 1953. The monastery later relocated to the town of 's-Heerenberg.
Revelations this year of widespread sexual abuse at Don Rua prompted a wave of publicity about sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands, Radio Netherlands reports.
The Church complaints body, Hulp en Recht (Help and Justice), has received more than 1,100 claims of abuse.
Victim 'ignored'

The unnamed victim asked the Bishop of Rotterdam, Adrianus Van Luyn, to publicly denounce abuses by the Salesian order two years ago, according to documents seen by Radio Netherlands Worldwide and Rotterdam newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
.........
Herman Spronck, Father Superior of the Salesians in the Netherlands, declined to comment, Radio Netherlands adds.


Then a later story in May 2011 says Fr. Spronck has been removed because he told an interviewer that sex between adults and children is not necessarily a bad thing and that he knew that one of the priests working for me was an officer in a pedophile organization.

The head of the Dutch Salesian order, Father Herman Spronck, has been placed on “administrative leave” for his part in a Dutch Catholic pedophile scandal.
Over the weekend, Spronck, known as the Delegate, said that sexual relationships between children and adults were not always damaging.
“Formally I always say that everyone must obey the law. But these relationships do not necessarily have to be damaging.” Nieuws quoted Spronck as saying.
Spronck was commenting on another Salesian priest’s committee membership in “Martijn”, a Dutch pro-pedophilia group.
RTL quoted Spronck, Fr Van B.’s superior — as saying he was aware of repeated transgressions in Van B.’s past. However he didn’t try to stop him from moving through three dioceses and six parishes in the Netherlands, often leaving under a cloud of suspicion, because he believed in the priest’s promises to reform.
“Herman Spronck is no longer the delegate from the Salesian delegation in the Netherlands,” his superior Rev. Jos Claes, leader of the Salesians in Belgium and the Netherlands, told RTL. “We fully distance ourselves from the words we find in your interview with Herman Spronck.”
Fr Van B “can longer perform any pastoral duties as of today,” he added.
The Salesian priest, simply known as Fr Van B, was a committee member of the “Martijn” association and also has two convictions for exposing himself to children. Although suspended from ministry, he worked as a “volunteer” helping prepare children for the first Holy Communion.

An independent commission investigating abuse cases dating back to 1945 has found that the Netherlands ranks worst behind only Ireland in a scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in Europe and the United States.