The Catholic Church, battered by sex abuse scandals from the US to
Belgium, is facing more damaging allegations in the Netherlands.
Figures released by an investigative commission showed
that almost 2000 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
religious history 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
fuelled the crisis. Nearly all of the cases are decades old, with
probably no more than 10 from the past 20 years.
Asked in March about the hundreds of complaints
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,'' he said, using a phrase associated with
Nazi excuses after World War II - We knew nothing.
Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said he had no comment and the matter was in the hands of Dutch bishops.
Next month Cardinal Simonis, the retired bishop of
Utrecht, will be a witness in a court hearing involving sexual abuse in
his previous diocese.
In an interim report issued on Thursday, a commission
headed by a former education minister, Wim Deetman, said it had received
about 1975 reports of sexual or physical abuse, some directly but
others through a body set up for victims, called Hulp en Recht.
Central to the growing debate over the church's culpability is the extent to which sexual abuse was tolerated and covered up.
SIC: SMH/AUS