Robert Chesal on How Dutch Castration Story Finally Came to Light

Dutch journalist Robert Chesal writes about the astonishing--and deeply troubling--story of the use of involuntary castration to "cure" young Dutch men reporting sexual abuse by Catholic religious authority figures.  As Chesal reports, there is strong evidence of a coordinated cover-up of this barbaric activity, which implicates Catholic officials, the police, and government figures.

The dark heart of the story:

In 1956, Henk [Heithuis], then 20-years-old and legally a minor, reported the clerical abuse to the police. Hearing about the abuse, the police treated him as if he were insane, bringing him to a Roman Catholic psychiatric hospital where he was involuntarily committed. People there told detectives Henk was “a homosexual, untrustworthy, a liar and mentally disturbed.” 

One month later, at St. Josephs hospital in the southern Dutch town of Veghel, Henk was surgically castrated or “eugenized,” as the hospital records put it, using a term previously attributed to the Nazi program of systematically sterilizing the mentally and physically handicapped.

For years, Cornelius Rogge, a friend of Henk Heithuis, tried to get journalists to investigate this story and to look at the extensive documentation he had compiled to demonstrate that Catholic institutions were castrating young men reporting sexual abuse by Catholic religious authority figures.  He got nowhere.

Not even when he wrote Wim Deetman, chair of the commission investigating sexual abuse in the Catholic church in the Netherlands, about this in 2010.  And now the story finally breaks, and Chesal explains what it took to get the media to hear the story . . . . 

Leo Cendrowicz also reports on the Dutch story at Time.