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	Dutch Catholic Church Faces Almost 2,000 Abuse Allegations By Stephen Castle Lexington Herald-Leader December 10, 2010 http://www.kentucky.com/2010/12/10/1560623/dutch-catholic-church-faces-almost.html The Roman Catholic Church, battered by sexual abuse scandals from the United States to Belgium, is facing a new set of damaging allegations in the Netherlands. Figures released Thursday by an investigative commission showed that almost 2,000 people had made complaints of sexual or physical abuse against the church, in a country with only 4 million Catholics. "The Roman Catholic Church has not faced a crisis like this since the French Revolution," Peter Nissen, a professor of the history of religion at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said of the growing abuse scandal. With one legal case starting this week, and accusations against two former bishops, the reaction of the church appears to have fueled the crisis. Nearly all of the cases are several decades old, with probably no more than 10 from the past 20 years. Asked in March on television about the hundreds of complaints already surfacing, one of the church's most senior figures, Cardinal Adrianus Simonis, shocked the nation by replying not in Dutch but in German. "Wir haben es nicht gewusst" — We knew nothing — he said, using a phrase associated with Nazi excuses after World War II. The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said he had no comment and that the matter was in the hands of Dutch bishops. In an interim report, issued Thursday, a commission headed by Wim Deetman, a Protestant and former education minister, said it had received roughly 1,975 reports of sexual or physical abuse, some directly but others through a body set up for victims, called Hulp en Recht, or Help and Justice. Central to the growing public debate over the church's culpability is the extent to which sexual abuse was tolerated and covered up. The hearing at which Simonis will testify next month involves a priest convicted of abusing three youngsters in Terneuzen. The priest had been arrested, though not prosecuted, on similar grounds in the late 1970s as director of a Catholic youth center near The Hague, part of the diocese where Simonis was then bishop.
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