Mar 28, 2016

Hundreds of Child Abuse by Catholic Priest Cases Handled Behind Closed Doors in the Netherlands

Ned Heiden
March 1, 2016
Church and State

This is really disturbing for me as a Dutch citizen.

For the people who have been living under a rock the past 25 years let me explain what is happening: The Roman Catholic Church is involved in an immense scandal concerning sexual child abuse perpetrated by their priests. First it came in the news as incidents, but thanks to the internet many thousands more people came forward as being abused by priests in their childhood.

This scandal could very well be the reason that Pope Benedict XVI – Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger – resigned on 28 February 2013. Usually the position of Pope is from installment until the end of his life. Of the 264 popes before him only five times was there a resignation.

In a small country as the Belgium today the official number of reported cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests currently is 1064. In the Netherlands where the Catholic church is less dominant, the independent Deetman Committee was installed to investigate the number of coverups by the Catholic Church. Deetman was granted access to church files that initially were reported as destroyed. Files that contained data about tens of thousands of children that were entrusted to priests. The committee also collected private statements about sexual child abuse from well over 2000 people. So far 1045 of these reported cases have been handled.

Here is where the fishy stuff starts.

At least one third of these cases were handled in secret, behind closed doors and this is remarkable because the committee had promised full disclosure.

The Dutch newspaper NRC has obtained internal documents that confirm cases were settled outside the official procedure, and this was explicitly against the recommendations of the Deetman Committee.

Full Disclosure was to be the foundation of the investigation and for that reason a foundation of management and monitoring was born that would oversee the procedures of complaints and compensation.

Until January this year about 700 of these cases were handled by this foundation and in total 21.3 million Euro in damages were awarded. According to NRC, in the 34% of cases that were handled in secret, another 10 million Euro were awarded. This was real Cloak and Dagger stuff. To receive compensation the victims had to sign a non disclosure contract and on top of that, the victims are no longer allowed to talk about the sexual abuse and the perpetrators…

Does this qualify as a coverup or not?

So the names of these Pedophiles among the Roman Catholic priests will remain a secret and the perpetrators will stay under their protection, the chance that the overall majority of these sexual predators will ever see one single day in prison is extremely slim…

Who needs conspiracy theories about Illuminati, the Bilderberg group? We have one hell of a secret organization residing in Rome called the Catholic Church.

Ned Heiden has an electrical engineering degree in industrial electrical systems and a degree in social political history. He blogs atDutch Heretic.

Basilica of St. Nicholas, Amsterdam. (Photo: Dennis Jarvis / Flickr)

http://churchandstate.org.uk/2016/03/hundreds-of-child-abuse-by-catholic-priest-cases-handled-behind-closed-doors-in-the-netherlands/

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