The Catholic church was aware of child abuse at orphanages and other institutions throughout the Netherlands as early as 1954, according to documents found by researchers in church archives.
DutchNews.nl – Catholic church in The Netherlands knew of abuse for decades, published warnings
Also, from the article:
The documents shed new light on the church’s claim not to have known about the widespread abuse of children living in church institutions.
Lawyer Martin de Witte, who is representing a number of victims, said the letters showed the church could no longer say it was not aware of the abuse and claim that the cases are now too old.[…]
‘They knew exactly what was going on but decided to to nothing about it,’ De Witte told the Volkskrant.
The Dutch case seems to follow a global pattern: abuse of children goes on for decades; Church claims they didn’t know about it; researchers/ journalists prove this claim wrong.
If any other organization followed a similar pattern across the world, I am sure there would be judicial instruments to try them in court. It seems that, in this case, there has been a tacit agreement to try this simply as “sexual abuse”, whereas as much as I am horrified to use this word (because of its usual connotations), this looks like a conspiracy of massive proportions.
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