Roermond Bishop Frans Wiertz has told the ANP news agency he was surprised to learn that his predecessor Jo Gijsen had the diocesan archives covering the period from 1972 till 1993 destroyed.

He said he could think of no reason why Bishop Gijsen had ordered their destruction. The archives of the Roermond diocese, in the southern province of Limburg, go back 450 years.

Mgr Wiertz could not say whether the Deetman Inquiry, an independent commission appointed by the government to investigate church sex abuse, was in any way hindered by the missing documents.

The bishop told ANP he did not much care about the damage the child abuse scandal may have caused to the image of the Roman Catholic Church:

“It’s about the damage done to people’s souls. That kind of damage is far more important than the damage to the church’s image.”

Other comments he made during the interview included:

“My first reaction was: Should anyone hurt these little ones, it were better a millstone was placed around his neck and he were cast into the depths of the sea.”

“Whatever the structure of the church may have been in the past, and however easy that structure may have covered up abuse, there is no excuse for it.”

However, in marked contrast to the above statements, he rejected a church investigation into the child abuse as demanded by victims’ group Mea Culpa because it was “a complicated matter.”

(gsh/mw)

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