We Shouldn't Blame the Catholic Church for the Shocking Dutch Castrations before We Know All the Facts
By Tim Stanley
There is nothing sadder or sicker than child abuse. Somehow it seems even worse when the abuser is a figure of trust – a parent, a teacher or a priest. And so the world was understandably horrified when the story came out of The Netherlands this week that a Dutch boy who had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest in the 1950s was castrated by doctors as a form of "punishment". It's a revolting, tragic incident that many have taken as a damning indictment of the Catholic Church's grip over Dutch society. The story is, however, rather more complicated than it first looks. The website GetReligion.org has done a brilliant deconstruction of the tragedy that points to a notable lack of either sourcing or context in the American reporting. Innuendo abounds – and that's not fair either to the Church or the children who suffered in its care. Here's how the New York Times first covered it: "The victim, Henk Heithuis, lived in Catholic institutions from infancy after being taken into care. When he complained about sexual abuse to the police, Mr. Heithuis, 20 at the time, was transferred to a Catholic psychiatric hospital before being admitted to the St Joseph Hospital in Veghel, where he was castrated [in 1956]." Heithuis befriended a sculptor called Cornelius Rogge and showed him his scars (the two men appear to have exchanged letters but details are not given in the NYT report). Heithuis died in a road accident in 1958. Many years later, Rogge took his story to the Deetman Commission, which was established in 2010 to investigate claims of sexual abuse by Dutch Catholic clergy. When the Commission apparently ignored the complaint, Rogge took it to an investigative journalist called Joep Dohmen. Dohmen did some digging and – it would seem largely on the basis of talking to Rogge and looking through his correspondence with Heithuis – concluded that 9 other boys suffered this terrible fate. Here are the problems. First, the New York Times makes no mention of the fact that the two men who Heithuis accused of abusing him were charged and prosecuted. Perhaps the reporter filing the story regarded that as unimportant, because the castration bit of the drama is the more newsworthy. Nevertheless, it does suggest that someone in the Church or the police did in fact take Heithuis's claims seriously. In which case, we need a fuller explanation of why he was later hospitalised. Second, the story is based entirely on the recollections of Rogge and his "correspondence". Did the Deetman Commission see the correspondence? For the Commission insists that it examined all the evidence provided by Rogge and didn't take the case any further because it found it to be inconclusive. Dohmen says that he does have concrete evidence of one other castration taking place (of a gay man who was not sexually abused) but cannot provide it for eight out of the ten cases that he has identified. The claim that Heithuis was castrated as a "punishment" is lifted from a personal email from Rogge to Dohmen. It is pure speculation. Moreover, administrative evidence for what took place is lacking. There's no explanation given for what happened by the Church, the psychiatrists involved or the hospital that oversaw the castration. We're not looking for a satisfactory medical explanation – it's difficult to conceive of such a thing being found – but rather something that explains the rationale behind the procedure and confirms it was forced on Heithuis, physically or psychologically. Court papers say that the castration occurred at Heithuis' own request. The law at the time offered it as "treatment" for repeat sexual offenders or the mentally insane. What really happened and how does it relate to Heithuis' abuse? As GetReligion.org puts it, this story offers, "uncorroborated anecdotal evidence from a man dead 54 years to insinuate the Church was complicit in a gruesome crime — yet we don't know if it was a crime. The history offered is full of gaps and makes assumptions — was the victim in the care of a Catholic institution when he reported the abuse? Was he passed from Catholic institutional custodial care to a Catholic-affiliated psychiatric hospital to a Catholic-affiliated surgery center for sterilization? Under what circumstances was the claim of abuse made? … Could the Catholic Church order the castration of a young man? How was that possible?" There might be good answers to all these questions, but they aren't offered. Nor is context. The sad, awful truth is that castration was not unheard of as a "psychiatric treatment" in the 1950s. GetReligion produces one academic source that confirms that, "From 1938 to 1968 in the Netherlands, after a decade of debates, 400 sex offenders who had been committed to asylums for the criminally insane were 'voluntarily' and 'therapeutically' castrated." One might compare this to the forced sterilisation of roughly 21,000 people deemed "socially unfit" in Sweden during the same time period. Incredibly, Sweden only recently moved to stop compelling people who change genders to undergo a similar procedure. Between 1935 and 1985, South Carolina also allowed mental health and prison officials to sterilise people diagnosed with "insanity, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy." Sweden and South Carolina are predominantly Protestant: the Catholic Church certainly wasn't responsible for their crimes. The point is that what occurred in The Netherlands in the 1950s was part of a wider eugenicist agenda that tried to cut "bad" people out of the gene pool by sterilising them. The Roman Catholic Church may have – in violation of its theology – participated in that programme in The Netherlands, but it did not invent it. It was state policy, not canon law. Nor did it invent the confusion so prevalent in the 1950s between homosexuality and paedophilia (just take a look at this revolting American public information film from the era). There's a growing consensus in the West that all the crimes of the past were the product of the Catholic Church's messed up theology. If only we were forcibly to "reform" that theology, maybe by judicial fiat, then we could atone for our history and build a safer future. But, from what little evidence is before us, we cannot conclude that the Catholic faith should be exclusively blamed for what happened to Heithuis when he was hospitalised. He seems to have been the victim of corrupt men and the corrupt social systems that they inhabit. Any error made on the part of the Church in this instance is a symptom of a wider moral crisis, not the primary cause.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.