Guess what’s happening with the Catholic Church in the Netherlands? You’ll never guess. I’ll give you one guess.

Okay… you win. (That was an easy game.)

A new bombshell report from a Dutch publication says that more than half of the leaders of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands either abused children themselves or covered up the crime over the course of decades.

More than half of the Netherlands’ senior clerics were involved in covering up sexual assault of children between 1945 and 2010, a press report claimed on Saturday, further engulfing the Catholic church in a global abuse scandal. Over the course of 65 years, 20 of 39 Dutch cardinals, bishops and their auxiliaries “covered up sexual abuse, allowing the perpetrators to cause many more victims”, the daily NRC reported.

Of those 20 Catholic leaders, four molested children. The other 16 covered it up by transferring the pedophiles to different churches. (Most of the priests involved are dead. The statute of limitations in all cases is long over. The living suspects said nothing to reporters.)

Someone tell Bill Donohue that other institutions don’t have a rate of abuse and cover-up this astronomically high…

The ironic thing here is that most of the numbers come from the Church itself based on an investigation conducted by the Deetman Commission in 2010-2011 and corroborated and added to by the NRC’s own research. As the news reports say, there were cardinals and bishops involved in the cover-up, meaning they knew there was child sexual abuse in the Church but did nothing to put a stop to it and turn over the offending priests.

One of the biggest questions ever since the Church’s sex abuse scandal was first publicized has been how high up this went. Who knew about the abuse, when did they know it, and what did they do about it?

This is just another indication that some of the highest-ranking Church leaders weren’t just aware of the abuse; they facilitated it. So what if a handful of children were traumatized for life? As long as the priests weren’t punished, that was good enough for them.

(Image via Shutterstock. Thanks to Hinse and Bob for the link)

