NETHERLANDS
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)
We shouldn’t blame the Catholic Church for the shocking Dutch castrations before we know all the facts
Tim Stanley
There is nothing sadder or sicker than child abuse. Somehow it seems even worse when the abuser is a figure of trust – a parent, a teacher or a priest. And so the world was understandably horrified when the story came out of The Netherlands this week that a Dutch boy who had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest in the 1950s was castrated by doctors as a form of “punishment”. It’s a revolting, tragic incident that many have taken as a damning indictment of the Catholic Church’s grip over Dutch society.
The story is, however, rather more complicated than it first looks. The website GetReligion.org has done a brilliant deconstruction of the tragedy that points to a notable lack of either sourcing or context in the American reporting. Innuendo abounds – and that’s not fair either to the Church or the children who suffered in its care.
Here’s how the New York Times first covered it: “The victim, Henk Heithuis, lived in Catholic institutions from infancy after being taken into care. When he complained about sexual abuse to the police, Mr. Heithuis, 20 at the time, was transferred to a Catholic psychiatric hospital before being admitted to the St Joseph Hospital in Veghel, where he was castrated [in 1956].” Heithuis befriended a sculptor called Cornelius Rogge and showed him his scars (the two men appear to have exchanged letters but details are not given in the NYT report). Heithuis died in a road accident in 1958.
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