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	Denmark's Catholic Church to Investigate Abuse Cases Dating Back Decades By Richard Steed The Canadian Press March 30, 2010 http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5glr7-0UmzUC00ao8cc-kOGli8gAw COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Denmark's Catholic Church will launch an investigation next week into claims of clerical abuse dating back several decades, a spokesman said Wednesday. The move comes after the church came under pressure from media and human rights groups to revisit allegations of sexual abuse that had not been reported to police. Claims that priests sexually abused children at Catholic institutions have swept across Europe, including in the small Catholic communities in the Nordic countries, which are predominantly Lutheran. Denmark's Catholic Bishop Czeslaw Kozon was strongly criticized earlier this month after telling a Danish newspaper that the church was under no legal obligation to report suspected cases of abuse to the police. "We have listened to our critics and next week this working group will start investigating these old sexual abuse cases," church spokesman Niels Engelbrecht told The Associated Press. "The trouble is many of the cases are 30 or 40 years old, and many of those priests accused are now dead." Engelbrecht said the working group would investigate about a dozen cases, mostly from the 1960s and 70s. "The first case we have heard about dates back to 1890's," he said. The working group will consist of four or five professionals, mainly non-Catholic, and will include a lawyer, a psychologist and other experts, Engelbrecht said. There are around 35,000 registered Catholics in Denmark, which has a population of 5.5 million. In neighbouring Sweden, the Catholic Church knows about one case of sexual abuse by a priest, from the 1950s, church spokeswoman Maria Hasselgren said. Hasselgren said the church in 2007 issued an apology in two newspapers at the request of the victim but didn't take any other action because the priest was dead and the victim "didn't want to make a big deal out of it." In Norway, Oslo's Bishop Bernt Eidsvig noted in a letter posted this week on the Norwegian Catholic Church's Web site that the church had investigated two separate claims of abuse from the 1950s. Both came to light after the two priests involved were dead. Eidsvig wrote that new allegations were brought "fairly recently" against one of the priests. The church met with the victim to discuss the allegations, he noted, in part to "learn from old cases how to prevent (abuse) and how to handle any new allegations that might arise." Associated Press writers Malin Rising in Stockholm and Ian MacDougall in Oslo contributed to this report.
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