To Be Clear, I Am NOT Recommending Protestantism

The Netherlands, a Few Years Later, Were Among the Reforming Episcopates at Vatican II · To Be Clear, I Am NOT Recommending Protestantism

Why was Henk Heithuis castrated?

Well, one reason is, some Catholic clergy, who were not denounced by their superiors, wanted their school kept under those clergy. They wanted to avoid "a scandal." By committing yet another atrocity.

So far, so good, some Catholic clergy are clearly to blame. Some of them then signed documents in Vatican II. Bekkers' politics of a secret archive seems to echo the politics or perhaps even precede the politics not perhaps so much by "John XXIII" in Crimen Sollicitationis as in its reception.

The text actually said sth about the secret trial possibly, if leading to a conviction, leading to public penalties for the priest. But first an investigation.

The result of the investigation could vary:

• if the accusation appeared to be unfounded, this was stated in the record and the documents containing the accusation were destroyed;
• if only vague evidence emerged, the case was filed away for use if fresh evidence appeared;
• if the evidence was strong but insufficient for arraigning the accused, he was given an admonition and the records were preserved with a view to any further developments;
• if the evidence was strong enough, the accused person was summoned and a canonical trial took place.

Quoting canon 2368 §1 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, then in force, Crimen sollicitationis, 61 indicated the penalties that could be imposed after conviction. These penalties, such as suspension a divinis, deprivation of an office or rank, and reduction to the lay state, were of public character, even if the trial itself had been conducted with all due secrecy. The same part of the document laid down that, in addition to those penalties, penances should be imposed on guilty priests, and those in danger of repeating their crime should be subjected to particular vigilance (64).

Well, it seems Bekkers was of a school of thought to which case after case appeared as "only vague evidence emerged" ...

We don't really know how much his predecessor knew, he could have stepped back after finding evidence that was damning in the Heithuis affair ...

So, is the castration that ruined his life the fault of the Catholic Church? Or rather its faulty representatives in the Netherlands?

Not only. The Catholic establishment took advantage of a system already in place, in a Netherlands where the Catholics certainly not did have a majority of their own. By 1860, the Protestants clearly dominated the Netherlands. By 1960, Catholics and Protestants were on par. Heithuis was castrated in 1955. The procedure was routine since some decades, presumably.

Castratie van mensen komt in de westerse samenleving bijna alleen nog voor wanneer er zeer dringende medische redenen zijn. Tot in de jaren 1960 werd in Nederland ook bij bepaalde homoseksuelen en pedoseksuelen in het kader van een TBS-behandeling castratie toegepast.

Terbeschikkingstelling, afgekort tbs (voor 1988: terbeschikkingstelling van de regering, afgekort tbr), is in het Nederlandse strafrecht een maatregel die de rechter kan opleggen aan een verdachte van een misdrijf, waar minimaal vier jaar gevangenisstraf op staat of van enkele specifiek genoemde delicten (bijvoorbeeld bedreiging en stalking). Voorwaarde is dat de rechter ervan overtuigd is dat de verdachte ten tijde van het delict lijdende was aan een gebrekkige ontwikkeling of ziekelijke stoornis van de geestvermogens.

The two article quotes would translate:

Castration of people in the Western society nearly only still occurs when there is an extreme medical urgency. Up to the 1960's, castration was also inflicted in the Netherlands on ascertained homosexuals and pedosexuals in the framwork of TBS treatment. (The article does not state which Dutch régime began this system. It's certainly posterior to 1860. And pretty certainly anterior to 1955.)

Terbeschikkenstelling, shortened TBS (before 1988 terbeschikkenstelling van de regering, shortened TBR), is in the Dutch penal law a measure that a judge can impose on a suspect of a crime, where minimally four years of prison is due to each single crime (for instance true threats or stalking) on the condition that he's convinced that the suspect at the time of the crime was suffering from insufficient mental development or pathologic trouble in the mental faculties.

So, arguably, the Catholic clergy involved certainly did not just take the legal system as it was and abuse it, but they were pro-active, acted as if Heithuis had been guilty of sodomy and sentenced by a judge to TBS. However, they could probably not have gotten away with the solution for a Catholic school's reputation, if such processes did not actually happen, on a regular basis. If sodomy had just been punishable, but not actually treated as "symptom of homosexuality" (back then seriously meant as a diagnosis), it would have been much harder for Heithuis' persecutors to simply hand him over to a medical doctor. Heithuis would have had due process. I think there may also have been a certain culture in which medical doctors could take "responsable" decisions pro-actively before a judge was involved. In other words, the Netherlands, where Protestants and Secularists together would have outnumbered the Catholics, were a medical dictatorship, like the Nordic countries or Nazi Germany. This culture existed independently of these Catholics abusing the system (in criminal ways, that the system legally speaking did not support).

There was another aspect to Catholic life in the Netherlands. There was a thing called pillarisation. Or in Dutch, verzuiling. Each major political and religious player, well, they took care of a section of society that supported the convictions, like in the Netherlands, Protestant, Catholic and Social Democrat. This was intact up to the World War, and while it began to losen up from 1946, it was still pretty much the rule in South Netherlands. Part of it was simply the right to chose your school according to your convictions, a good thing, but it went far beyond that. Each of the three pillars had a reputation to look after, and Catholics were not the most well seen of the three.

The man responsible for this was to some degree Abraham Kuyper (according to wikipedians), a Calvinist.

And psychiatry is so to speak a secularised Calvinism, not the least in the case of what Dutch calls TBS and Sweden "vårddom" ...

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Virgil of Salzburg
27.XI.2024

Salisburgi, in Norico, sancti Virgilii, Episcopi et Carinthiorum Apostoli, qui a Gregorio Nono, Pontifice Maximo, in Sanctorum numerum adscriptus est.