In World, this thread is currently sitting between 'Children's Firsts' and 'Things That Are Evil', which seems to aptly cover both the marking of life events that was the Church's main role for lots of people and the reason why they're now deciding that enough is enough.

I thought that there wasn't anything left that would shock me about the Church's behaviour, the bar having been dragged so far down, but that Netherlands story puts the lie to that notion.

Yeah, that isn't "just" child rape and cover-ups: as vile as those things are, they stem, respectively, from depravity and the abuse of power, and from cowardice and misplaced loyalty to the in-group. Those are at least human deformations we already knew about. These castrations are something else again, surely. That's cold, premeditated, brutal evil, as an instrument of policy.

One wishes these people were right about the existence of Hell.

I am completely at a loss.

I'm not.
Such was their power in Catholic Ireland that Brady, who claims he was only doing the minutes (yet contradicts himself in a letter where he claims he was 'sent to investigate' a particular abuse claim) and his mates were allowed to interview a terrified 14 year old boy, refusing the boy's father permission to attend, then swearing the boy to secrecy on a bible.
The same victim claimed that his abuser ( Brendan Smyth)pulled up in a car outside his place of part-time work on a number of occasions to intimidate him into silence.

Malignant savages.

The root of all evil is the heart of the black soul.

I'd like to say that they're finished, but the desperate and needy will still turn up every week to put coins in the plate.

The castration thing indeed leaves one at a loss. The spokesman for the Dutch bishops' conference got it almost right when he said: "The fact that people were unsurprised by these latest claims suggests our image couldn't get any worse." I think it has got even worse.

Though I'm not sure what Why At Last means by "an instrument of policy". We know of 11 cases. This is not, it seems, a widespread thing in the Catholic Church, in the way the sexual abuse and their cover-up was.

Some Catholics in Holland are saying that castrations (and electrical shock therapy) were quite widespread generally, saying about 400 men were castrated in the Netherlands in state institutions between 1938 and 1968, and that such treatment was used to "treat" homosexuality in Britain and Scandinavia, which suggest that the Alan Turing case was not an aberration (his castration can hardly be described as a voluntary act).

Even if that is so, and we'd want some concrete evidence, it does not exonerate the Catholic Church and the Dutch politicians involved from covering up this evil perpetrated against 11 (or more?) boys.

Turing wasn't physically castrated. No one took a knife and cut his bollocks out from his bleeding scrotum. Though what happened to him was, the nonexistent God knows, appalling enough.

I don't really know why anyone would think that the image of the church matters a toss.

I told he was lucky he kept his knackers.

Incidentally, the US State dept are somewhat worried about the Vatican City's finances.

Money laundering in the temple. What would Jesus do?

The political reaction is just kicking into gear - Labour calling for Brady to resign, and even Fianna Fail's Martin agreeing that it would be the best course of action, while FG have been conspicuously silent todate.

Of course, forced castrations happened all the time back in the day when the Church needed choristers whose voices didn't break after only a couple years. (What with females being an unacceptable alternative.)

There's a famous quote by the 18th-century English music historian Charles Burney (one of the first important historians of Western music) which is grimly reminiscent of the present situation. Having gone on a mission to find where castrations were carried out, he wrote this:

"I enquired throughout Italy at what place boys were chiefly qualified for singing by castration, but could get no certain intelligence. I was told at Milan that it was at Venice; at Venice that it was at Bologna; but at Bologna the fact was denied, and I was referred to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from Rome I was sent to Naples ... it is said that there are shops in Naples with this inscription: 'QUI SI CASTRANO RAGAZZI' ('Here boys are castrated'); but I was utterly unable to see or hear of any such shops during my residence in that city."

To my knowledge the Church has never apologized for its role in the castrations, which needless to say were often lethal.

Eggchaser wrote:


"The Vatican has for the first time appeared on the State Department's list of money-laundering centers but the tiny city-state is not rated as a high-risk country."

It's not because money-laundering has been discovered, but because the Vatican is vulnerable to being used for that purpose. IIRC, the Vatican ranks better than the United States on that list.

Just as you think the Dutch Catholic Church revelations cannot possibly plumb new depths- Multiple deaths at boys' home were no accident.