More horrific stories are emerging from the Roman Catholic Church's child sexual abuse scandal. This time from the Netherlands, and the crimes happened decades ago but the stories are just now being told. The Dutch Catholic Church found the ideal "cure" for boys abused by priests and then considered to be gay:
The Roman Catholic church actively encouraged the castration of homosexual boys and men in the 1950s and 1960s, according to scholars who testified this week before the Dutch parliament. Medical historian Mart van Lieburg told parliament that a Dutch bishop ordered surgeons to perform castrations.
Who were these poor victims? We still don't have a lot of information, but apparently many were boys who were raped by priests, and then, as customary in the Church, were accused of having "seduced" their abusers. One young boy named Henk Huithuis blew the whistle on his rapist; the Church then ordered a radical castration, i.e. complete removal of both testicles, as treatment for his alleged homosexuality:
Rather than accepting his treatment as part of the divine scheme of things, which is how most victims handled their treatment, Heithuis turned whistleblower and accused one of the institution’s priests of rape. At age twenty – and still a minor under the Dutch law of the time – the young man was committed to the Catholic “House Padua” psychiatric hospital. Found to be a homosexual who supposedly had himself seduced his attacker, the Church's standard defense agains such charges, Heithuis was duly “eugenicized,” i.e. castrated, at the hospital. Although this supposedly occurred at his own request, there is no signed consent form on record. Nobody bothered to ask his parents.
Nor was Henk's case unique. At least 50 Dutch children were castrated at the recommendation of the Roman Catholic Church. And these were among the 20,000 children sexually abused by more than 800 priests in the Netherlands since 1945.
In a way, radical castration is a perfect outcome of the Church's doctrine of priestly celibacy. For anyone interested in the history of the Catholic Church's distorted views on human sexuality I recommend a book by the German theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann - Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. Ranke-Heinemann summarizes the effect of the celibacy doctrine in the all-male Church hierarchy:
For this exclusively male world, this womanless terrarium in which popes and their educators move and which, by placing them in a totally separate society, is supposed to preserve them from what they would see as the beginning of their gravest error, namely the perception of the other half of the human race, for this ghetto of the male church, women are still only objects to be ignored in the prosess whereby the celibates take protective measures for maintaining their chaste little world part. They strive to behave "as if there were no women," and {..} in their infantile flight into a sort of male uterus of a womanless world, they can have no vision for the real world, that is, for a world full of men and women, which means for a world of human beings.
As we see, it is not just women who suffer the consequences of Church doctrine, but also young boys.
Dr. Uta Ranke-Heinemann became the first woman in the world to hold a chair of Catholic theology at the University of Essen. She lost her chair in 1987 after denying the virgin birth and considered herself excommunicated. She appealed to her friend and classmate Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI) for his support and intervention, but was met with silence.