Posted on 05/11/2012 1:40:26 PM PDT by Gillibrand
Hardly anyone knew Henk Heithuis when he was killed in a car accident on 28 October 1958 when only 23 years old. Today, fifty years after his untimely death, the sad fate of the Dutchman is extensively covered in the international press – from the "Spiegel" to the FAZ to the "Telegraph".
The media interest has a reason: The name of the young man at the centre of a scandal brings shame on the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands and also reaction in politics. This is because Heithuis, who spent nearly his entire life in Catholic homes and boarding schools, was there not only sexually abused but the church prompted his castration, supposedly to cure his homosexuality.
From the confessional to the surgeon
Worse still, the unfortunate Heithuis was perhaps just one of several victims who were castrated.
(Excerpt) Read more at cathcon.blogspot.co.uk ...
Anyone check out when Joe Kennedy (JFK"s dad) gave his daughter Mary a frontal lobotomy? I think it was in that same period of quack surgery to cure things people didn't like.
1. Just because people have decided half a century later that Euthanasia is ok, somehow excuses the behaviour of the Catholic Church?
2. In essence you are saying that the Church is vulnerable to secular trends like any other organization?
Castration is against Church teaching. This is bad - but it does not reflect on what the Church teaches.
Even in the US there were places where eugenics was being experimented with in those days.
Bet he sang like a bird.
There were a lot of medical and quasi-medical folks around in the 40s and 50s who thought it to be the sina qua non of ethical medical practice to sterilize American Indian women ~ that way you'd have fewer babies growing up to be alcoholics.
Then there were the folks who thought all stray Indian babies ought to be adopted out to loving white folks.
That worked ~ frequently the family would discover their daughter had some health problems and inherited differences that just didn't fit a pattern they could deal with.
Let me tell you, a castrated gay guy in the Netherlands is the least of the stories out of that place. Failure to properly evaluate the German physicians they let into the country post WWII is probably the source of more horror than you can imagine.
Not to protect the Catholics, but stuff happens ~ and nobody could have done anything about it because, frankly, they were in a pond with alligators up to their eyeballs at the time.
BTW, the Dutch medical community had already decided that euthanasia was OK decades before ~ it just took time for them to figure out how to weasle-worm their way into making it all legal.
That's called hypocrisy. Teaching but not doing.
One thing you can always count on on FR is the Catholic bashing that I’ve seen on here over and over again.
On that subject they join ranks with the liberals who would want to destroy a religion based on the acts of a very few.
Yeah they did involuntary sterilizations in the 20’s and 30’s sometimes if you have family members who were “delinquent” in their terms they would sterilize you and any other family member based on the ruling of a “family hygiene court”
That’s a good point; the Nazi’s didn’t spontaneously generate. There were many things in Europe particularly that contributed to left wing fascism.
It may still be happening. In 1980, I worked in a group home in Washington State. One of the young women who lived there told me that one of the young male residents made regular visits to her room at night. She said that she “got a baby” from his visits, but it wouldn’t happen again, because she had an operation on her belly button.
Well, I would imagine you could take it further and say that the Bishops and the Pope are also influenced by secular thought, to some extent. And so would the Catholic Church.
Well, you could say that the Dutch as a whole did not consider euthanasia to be acceptable until very recently.
Catholics and liberal is not two different things, the majority of Catholics are part of the liberal coalition.
That's happened before of course.
So, there you have a readily understood exposition of how Catholic religious thought can intersect with Secular thought.
If you were Hindu, or Southern Buddhist, you would not, as a matter of religion, consider roast beef sandwiches acceptable ~ more like some really bad luck for the cow!
Nor would you think of them as tasty.
There's an example of religious thought dominating everything conceivable given a simple roast beef sandwich.
You could do pretty much the same way with any particular brand of Protestant thought ~ or Moslem thought for that matter.
Change it to pig, though, and all those others drop out of the concensus!
Are priests, bishops and the Pope motivated in any respect by an exclusively secular point of view regarding roast beef sandwiches? Or is it, "they are a blessing" all the way down from the top.
come on now...keep with the plan...
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