By Jeff Epperly
Bay Windows
August 24, 2011
http://www.baywindows.com/index.php?ch=columnists&sc=reality_check&sc2=&sc3=&id=123785
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Just when you thought the worldwide Catholic sexual and emotional abuse scandal couldn’t possibly get any creepier or morally degenerate than it already has been, along comes news from the Netherlands that it could be much worse there than anyone ever imagined.
As with so many other secular law enforcement entities around the world who have had to take abuse investigations out of the hands of church authorities because such outstanding Christians cannot be entrusted to find the truth, Dutch officials in the Public Prosecution Office created the Deetman Commission to investigate the overwhelming number of abuse reports that have come to light in that country.
What they have uncovered in trying to look back at the history of abuse since the 1950s is an unusually high number of deaths of under-aged boys in a Roman Catholic institution for mentally disabled children in the town of Heel. A total of 34 boys?a number too large to be explained by any statistical blip?died under mysterious circumstances in 1952, 1953, and 1954. The death rate dropped back to normal after 1954.
Furthermore, the Deetman Commission has also established that, at the time, the local secular authorities, in conjunction with the local Catholic archdiocese and a Catholic child protection agency (there’s an oxymoron for you) all knew about the mysterious deaths and apparently did little or nothing to investigate them.
Local authorities are quick to point out that they do not have evidence linking any church official to the mysterious deaths, and most likely they never will. Dead children cannot speak for themselves, memories from so long ago fall short, and files in Catholic abuse investigations have a way of disappearing. Couple these issues with the fact that the statute of limitations for murders committed at that time has long expired, and it appears that these children will never get justice.
But the important thing here is that everyone appears to be thinking the one thing that makes sense: if you are capable of raping little children or participating in an overwhelming cover-up that allows those sexual assaults to continue, it really is just a hop, skip and a jump morally to killing someone to cover your crimes.
There was a time?as Deetman investigators are discovering, once again?when local police, prosecutors and the public would have thought the last people capable of hurting children would be Catholic clergy. Rightfully so, the first thing for which they look whenever a child is raped these days is whether there was a church official, or church camp counselor, or church choir leader, or really any male clergy person anywhere in the vicinity.
After all, it was less than a year ago that former Dutch Bishop Jan Bluyssen stood accused of shredding church documents related to sexual and emotional abuse cases in the archdiocese, all while he was refusing to testify in front of Deetman commissioners.
Now comes word that Deetman investigators have discovered a string of similarly mysterious deaths among mentally disabled girls in a Catholic institution in the same archdiocese during the same years. In the St. Anna institution, more than 40 girls died under strange circumstances. All were under the age of 12 and some were infants and toddlers. The deaths started in 1952 and ended in 1954.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, anger continues to mount at weekly revelations about the moral depravity of Catholic officials who were once entrusted to basically run that country’s child welfare system, but who instead ran what amounted to a government-funded production line of sexual, emotional and physical abuse of thousands of kids from the margins of society. (It should be noted that at least one Irish bishop has gone on the run, rather than answer for his crimes.)
And that is the most disgusting part: we know now without a doubt that Catholic bishops and priests didn’t generally prey on the kids of their well-to-do parishioners. They targeted poor kids, destitute kids, kids without parents or hope or homes. They even targeted kids who were mentally challenged.
And now it appears that, at the very least, they may have looked the other way while someone was killing children in Dutch institutions.
I bring all this up because Pope Mary Prada appeared in Madrid Aug. 21 at World Youth Day and had the audacity to once again denounce same-sex civil marriage, saying, "[T]o acknowledge the beauty and goodness of marriage is to realize that only a setting of fidelity and indissolubility, along with an openness to God’s gift of life, is adequate to the grandeur and dignity of marital love."
These people are shameless.
After so many years of mounting proof that so many forever unmarried Catholic officials don’t even understand the morality of right and wrong, much less what makes a loving marriage, it’s astounding that anyone but the most conservatively deluded Opus Dei nutcases even listens to anything coming out of a Vatican that is thick with abuse enablers, child fuckers and right-wing closet cases.
Jeff Epperly is the former editor of Bay Windows. He can be reached at jefepp1@gmail.com
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