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 Sunday'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."
SIC: RNW/INT'L