Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is mostly associated with boys. Less known is how girls fared. The Women’s Platform for Church Child Abuse (VPKK) presented the life stories project Nobody Will Believe You on Friday, 9 September 2016, to give a voice to these women.

No one will believe you

The project consists of six video interviews with women who have experienced sexual abuse and mistreatment in the Catholic Church.

During the Second World War, the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (GKN) experienced a church war that resulted in the so-called Liberation of 1944. With the Liberation, 90,000 Reformed people (approximately twelve per cent) left the GKN and founded a new denomination, later called the Reformed Churches (Vrijgemaakt).

Little is known about how young members of the church experienced the wartime split.
In this oral history project, a number of them will have their say. The central question is how they experienced the wartime church split.

The wartime schism was a major event. National Socialism was considered an anti-Christian ideology by most Reformed people. The members of the GKN therefore played a relatively large role in the resistance against the occupying forces, although there were also well-known Reformed people who joined the NSB and SS. The divisions could be twofold: either for or against Nazism, or both for or against the separation of the church. In any case, the close ties of friendship and family within the community were under great pressure. From the very beginning, those who separated were criticised for their broken unity. The Vrijgemaakten, however, emphasised that they were fighting the same battle for freedom of conscience in church and society.

As part of this oral history project, nuns were interviewed about their experiences during the years of German occupation. The sisters were especially asked about the consequences of such phenomena as quartering, refugees, people in hiding and evacuation for their relatively closed life, organised according to a strict daily order.

The interviewees are members of the Catholic congregation Sisters of Charity in Tilburg and they all experienced the war in a different way. Some of them worked in the mother house of the Congregation, others worked outside, for example in a hospital. After the Second World War, the Sisters spoke little about their war experiences and all attention was focused on restoring the pre-war order and regularity.

It was not until much later that open discussions and writings about monastery life during the years of occupation began. The one-sided image of the ideal self-sacrificing warrior nun prevailed. The testimonies of the nuns show that the reality was richer. Some sisters played a supporting role in the institutions where they worked and opened their doors to people in need (Jewish people in hiding, refugees), but also to the occupying forces.