Radio Netherlands
December 18, 2010
http://www.rnw.nl/english/bulletin/former-bishop-decides-cooperate-deetman-commission
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Former bishop Jan Bluyssen says he will cooperate fully with an investigation into sex abuse in the Catholic church after all. In a report in today's edition of Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad that he shredded documents containing evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church he said he would not talk to the commission. The former bishop now says he will meet the chairman of the inquiry, Wim Deetman, soon.
Earlier today news broke from Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad and Radio Netherlands that the former bishop of the diocese of Den Bosch destroyed documentation on sex abuse cases in the 1970s. This was already made known to the Deetman Commission in September. Another archive on sex abuse from the 1990s is also missing. It is not clear how many other documents may have been destroyed. It is possible that the archives no longer contain any evidence of the wide-spread sex abuse of children in Catholic institutions.
Former diocese archivist Jan Peijnenburg told NRC Handelsblad on Saturday, the the Deetman Commission could "come to see him but it wouldn't get anything out of it. And it wouldn't find anything in the archive."
Former Bishop Bluyssen says in the newspaper that he threw the archives away, because there was little of any interest in them."According to him "It was over, the cases had been dealt with. I never thought anyone would ever want to see them."
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