Erin Go Bragh!

“When the Taoiseach spoke in the Dáil, the Taoiseach was speaking for the Government and he was speaking, I believe, for the people of this country.

“The abuse of children is not acceptable. The abuse of children is intolerable. And those who didn’t discharge their responsibility to make sure that it stopped, or that those who were responsible for it were brought to book, they have a case to answer and the Government makes no apology for stating that in the unambiguous terms that it was stated by the Taoiseach.”

~ Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Eamon Gilmore, this morning in the Irish Times 

It's been a while since I blogged in general but about the Catholic Church Pedophile scandal in particular. But things have heated up so much that I had to post about it. I am currently so stoked to be part-Irish, I can't tell you. Of course, I'm no fan of the Church, as any regular reader of the blog knows, and I was silently cheering back in July, when Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny took on the Pope of the Catholic Church in a truly riveting speech on the floor of the Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Irish Parliament) on July 20:

Reactions worldwide to Kenny's blistering censure of the Catholic Church, the Holy See and the Teflon Pope were swift, stunned and almostly universally positive. (I'll leave it to your imagination for a moment as to where the negatives came from...) Said the NY Times: "The rare denunciation of the Holy See’s influence in this predominantly Catholic country came just a week after the government issued a report accusing the Vatican of sabotaging Irish bishops’ 1996 decision to begin reporting suspected cases of child abuse to the police.”

Kenny's speech and position are all the more stunning because of his  reputation as a Conservative Gael and the fact that he is a practicing Catholic himself. He took great pains to say how difficult this matter must be for priests who are innocent of any wrong doing and whose Church's attempts to protect the guilty have summarily tarred all priests with their taint. 

What was the Vatican's reaction to PM Kenny's request, via the Irish Papal Nuncio, and his speech on the floor of Parliament for a Vatican reply to the Cloyne Report? The Vatican recalled their ambassador to Ireland, (*slap* take that you ingrate Celts!) and finally, on Saturday, the 3rd of September, issued a 25 page, 11,000 word reply, decrying Kenny's speech as making "unfounded" accusations against the Catholic Church, etc. etc. etc. Thankfully, Kenny has refused to back down on his statement that "the Vatican's intervention had contributed to an undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish State and Irish bishops."

Today, Ireland's Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Eamon Gilmore has fired a very clear salvo back at the Vatican and their 25 page denial of interference with the Irish police investigations into the Irish Catholic Church's systematic abuse of children and youths. The Vatican's correspondence denies the principal findings of the Cloyne Report, a document commissioned by the Irish government in 2009 and released in mid-July of this year, but mostly by ignoring it. Well, Gilmore will have none of it and says, as quoted above, that the Irish Taoiseach speaks with the voice of the Irish people.

For those who have not followed the story, the Cloyne Report investigated the role of the Catholic Church and the Irish State in the allegations of abuse put forth against 19 clerics in the diocese in County Cork. The report, which you can read in full here, (Please note that while the full PDF is not that reader friendly, you can go to the end of the 421 page document, where you do have a full index to let you peruse more easily) is a fairly damning piece of work. It clearly finds that in most cases, the Irish gardaí (police) were not informed of allegations of child abuse or child sexual abuse. It further finds that while the Church purported to support child protection procedures, they failed to show any genuine commitment to that support because they failed, consistently, to implement those child protection procedures but rather undermined them. The Church consistently erred on the side of the accused predator and in one instance, in a case which was "clearly and unequivocally a case of child sexual abuse," stated that no abuse had occurred. In the reply sent by the Vatican on Saturday, the Holy See takes the position that child abuse, and child sexual abuse, by priests in Ireland is an Irish problem, not a Church problem. Because, gosh, it's not like this happened anywhere else. *cough* It's not like there were pedophile priests running around in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, the Philippines, the USA, or anything. I mean, come on! What do you think, that the Church covered things up and just moved pedophiles around to newer and progressively more remote locations where they could continue prey on children without controversy? Mais non, it cannot be!!!!

The Vatican especially accuses Kenny of having misinterpreted, by taking it out of context, a statement made by the Teflon Pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, which went something along the lines "the standards of democratic society do not apply to the Catholic Church" (so shut up already because we so special and above the law of a sovereign state). I think the writing is on the wall that that's exactly what he meant, and what the Church evidently believes. They are above it all. 

But are we really supposed to believe that God has given his/her/its imprimatur on the way the Church has handled pedophile priests around the globe? Really? Well, as the Irish Times said in their editorial this morning, the Church that holds itself the bastion of moral and spiritual superiority has given a "bureaucratic, self-serving, and legalistic response" that completely ignores reflection on the clear cut findings in Cloyne. Which only makes matters worse. They took more than a month to come up with a reply that cries foul but ignores the very heart of the issues in Cloyne: that the Catholic Church has sought to undermine Irish laws and protections in place for their most vulnerable parishioners, child victims of abuse. To me, Kenny's diatribe against the Vatican looks even better in retrospect when you read the Vatican's response. When they can only attack the messenger, instead of the message, clearly there is some truth, or maybe a lot of truth, in the message.

To Kenny, Gilmore and the Dáil and Seanad houses of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) who have made motions deploring the Vatican's "interference, undermining the Irish child protection framework" and the "inadequate and inappropriate response of the Church", all I can say is, More power to you! I cannot imagine how heartening Kenny's speech was to those who were abused. He has given a powerful voice to the cause of all those around the planet who were victims of these priests and then re-victimized by the Church's ignoring or subverting their cries for justice. 


It is refreshing to finally see the Catholic Church is getting called on their centuries of subterfuge, abetting criminals and to see their façade finally start to dissolve a bit.

And to the Teflon Pope... the gloves are off. At last. When an entire government refuses to be silent, you have lost substantial ground in your campaign of Vatican-condoned coverups.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Running the Gamut

(Image credit AFP/The Telegraph)

Do They Need Counsel?

I haven't been much up for writing for the past week, as many of you will have noticed. But I just can't let it slide that the Vatican, the same outfit that has botched how they handled the sexual and physical abuse scandals raging around the planet, now has their bank investigated for laundering money? To the tune of $30M USD? It's just too amazing, like you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

Meanwhile, Sinéad O'Connor hits another home run in her Open Letter to the Pope.

"We deserve better than lies and insults to our intelligence. 

The Holy Spirit deserves better.

As long as the house of The Holy Spirit remains a haven for criminals the reputation of the church will remain in ruins.

Finally, your statement that you hope the church's "humiliation will help the victims" is deplorable on two levels.

One: not one member of The Vatican has publicly displayed an iota of humility over this issue. Instead each person who has spoken has done so most arrogantly and dismissively.

Two: how dare you use the word humiliation to describe what you and the church are going through? Hope and pray, and thank God that you will never know the abject humiliation of children who were raped by monsters in the employ of your church. That is true humiliation."

Sinéad, you can advocate for justice anytime, anywhere.


© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Top Ten Reasons That The Catholic Church Is A Disaster

Waving Parishioners Buh-Bye...

10. Calls proven allegations of pedophile priests "petty gossip".


9. Calls criticism of the Vatican a "media plot".


8. Continues to talk about the pedophilia problem in the Church in compartmentalized fashion rather than acknowledging pervasive abuse that was tolerated for decades if not centuries.


7. Expresses outrage that Belgian authorities don't believe Church will turn over evidence of pedophile priests.


6. Castigates Archbishop of Vienna for speaking out about Vatican blocking of abuse investigations.


5. Trots out Vatican Secretary of State to say pedophilia in the priesthood is really just a homosexuality problem.


4. Thinks priests having sex with adolescents doesn't really count as pedophilia.

3. Mentions ordination of women in SAME STATEMENT with pedophilia, committed for decades by priests. 


2. US Conference of Bishops calls the Vatican's new guidelines "a welcome clarification" while ignoring the sheer insult of associating ordination of women as priests with PEDOPHILIA, both to women and to the victims of pedophile priests.


1. STILL DOES NOT REQUIRE REPORTING OF PEDOPHILES TO CIVIL AUTHORITIES!!!



© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Teflon Pope Still Amazingly Non-Stick

The Pope, back in May 2010.

He so sorry...

Have you missed the Teflon Pope? Well the NY Times has him, and his Church, back under the microscope.

But first, let's just mention that raid late last week in Belgium. If you read the wires, you know that the Belgian authorities decided to raid and seize evidence of child sexual abuse that they clearly thought there wasn't a snowball's chance on the sun that the Vatican's Belgian Commission would allow them to "receive". This all went down at a monthly meeting of bishops who were investigating more than 475 allegations that have been made since Roger Vangheluwe, the Bishop of Bruges since 1984, resigned on April 23, 2010, after admitting to sexually abusing a young man years ago.

In a piece of spin doctoring that can only leave you utterly astonished, not only at the fact they think we'll believe them blindly (faithfully) at this point, but in its offensiveness to the actual victims themselves, the Vatican expressed concern that the raid on the Church Commission and a retired Archbishop's properties would violate the privacy and confidentiality of the poor, poor victims. I'm really not kidding.

The Catholic News Service reports that the Belgian authorities' take on this bit of spider-worthy master spinning was:

"Belgian officials dismissed that argument. Their unspoken presumption seemed to be that because of their inaction in the past, church leaders cannot be trusted to act in the public interest on sex abuse allegations."

Wow, they've noticed inaction on the part of the church? The Church can't be trusted to investigate things and then report to the proper civil authorities if there is evidence of abuse? Really?

The Vatican was quite upset at this raid, some of which involved even drilling into tombs for evidence. Sometimes I'm still not sure if the Vatican was considering the victims to be the children or the priests accused. I read a number of articles on the Vatican's statements on this and my takeaway is sort of mostly that they're alarmed that the Belgians have set a precedent for civil authorities taking matters, and evidence, into their own hands. 

Why might they be worried? Well, if you start hauling away records and evidence, who knows how deep the scandal could become. Because if you dig into the archives, assuming there will still be archives in other places after the Belgian raid, you'll find decades of coverup.  Because, as mentioned above, the NY Times had this wonderful article in which they detail a number of facts that can be best summarized as:

1) Ratzinger did little to stop abuse while in his position as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body mysteriously charged with investigating (and covering up????) the claims of victims and their families. (See here for a well-docmented US case)

2) Ratzinger actually reined in several national Bishop Conferences that tried to tackle the issue head-on, since the Vatican was ignoring the problem. 

3) Historically, the Church made it very hard to defrock a priest, no matter how abusive the priest was. This upset a number of bishops who seemed to feel that the Church was going to lose credibility and their faithful if they didn't take the situation seriously (see article in #1 above). In fact many felt the Church deliberately thwarted attempts to oust pedophile priests and the bishops were increasingly balky over the idea of just sending them elsewhere. Some bishops really pressed the Vatican on the issue. Ratzinger's Holy Office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith held the right to dismiss a priest without even a formal trial, on the basis of firm evidence (of which, make no mistake, there was aplenty in many, many cases and the evidence was NOT given to civil authorities.) Can someone find the actual figures of the number of priests actually dismissed by Ratzinger's office? Because I can't.

4) Incredibly, at a watershed meeting in 2000 attended by 17 bishops concerned about the issue, Church officials claimed child sexual abuse by priests was "only a problem in the English-speaking world" (that would surely be news to victims in Brazil, Chile, Italy and India and many other places...) and advocated for protecting the rights of accused priests over safeguarding children.

5) The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was responsible for handling sexual abuse cases but clearly sat on that information for decades and then once they admitted that they were responsible finally began to make some reforms but only when really pressed to do so by a very wealthy and outspoken Catholic Conference. Wanna guess which one? Some of the strongest reforms have been offered to the noisiest and heavily media-coveraged advocates for change- the American bishops.

"The Americans were allowed to keep their zero-tolerance provision for abusive priests, making the rules for the church in the United States far more stringent than in most of the rest of the world. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also said it would waive the statute of limitations on a case-by-case basis if bishops asked... Other reforms enacted by American bishops included requiring background checks for church personnel working with children, improved screening of seminarians, training in recognizing abuse, annual compliance audits in each diocese and lay review boards to advise bishops on how to deal with abuse cases."

(quoted from the NY Times)

And what has been the outcome of this? The number of cases of reported abuse since 2005 has steadily fallen according to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (we should note that in 2009 it was still an awful 513 reports against 346 priests). But do you think that the Vatican learned from the drop in numbers over the past five years? Did it cause them to make policy changes? Hmmmmm.

In April the Vatican posted guidelines on its official website stating that church officials should comply with all local civil laws in reporting and investigating abusive priests. But that was only a recommendation and not a requirement. It seems there are many in the Church who think that the US policy of zero tolerance, including their expulsion without due process, is unfair to priests, leaving them open to embarrassing investigations of allegations as if they were just average citizens. The lack of a mandate for reporting has been expressed as concern for priests working in countries where the Church is subject to persecution. You know, places with dictatorships and such. Of course, the problem is that I seem to remember Ratzinger's minions tossing around the word persecution in reference to the US, Australian and European press making a big fuss over the scandals in Ireland, Italy and Germany and the fact that too little was done to clean up the Church after the big scandals in Australia and the US. (For those of you wanting to look at a gem of persecution claims, check out the richly illustrated and rhetorical Anglo-Catholic. Food and beverage consumption while reading are not recommended...)

Well, it's July and there's still no mandate to report. And I'm wondering when and if there finally is a mandate to report, whether those reporters will have to release documentation. In Belgium they even had to take documents from the National Archives for records of reported abuse, on top of carting quite a haul (two and a half truckloads!) from the Bishop's Commission investigating allegations of abuse.

Clearly the police in Belgium were onto something. I guess they read that Vatican recommendation thing.

And realized that it still came up a little short...

---

As an aside, I'm still reflecting on an interview Sinead O'Connor gave to NPR two weeks ago. She questioned the actual beliefs of pedophile priests. "[It's] as if they don't believe in God. They certainly don't believe in a God that is watching them or what they're doing."

She remains a singular voice in the fray.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Pedophiles, Gay Men, The Catholic Church and The Church's Spurious Correlation Theory

It's been a bad week at blogging for me. Some health stuff has me kind of shaken up. But it doesn't have me so shaken that I'm not reading the news and keeping up with all the commentary on the Catholic Church and all the spurious theories about gay men being pedophiles. 

Clearly the Church, and especially gay anything have become something of a hot button topic for me. I've got that Irish Catholic side of the family, the great uncle who was a deacon and plus I've got, and have long had, some very dear friends who are gay. Including the happily, but not legally since they live in Florida, 'married' couple who have lived across the street from my mother since 1973. Yeah, Ned and Charles are just so fly-by-night... why should they be allowed to marry? Personally, I'm really thinking I can't say a thing that's negative about their right to be legally married or make health decisions for each other until I've been with my husband as long as they've been together. (I've got another twenty years then... And Charles gave me such good advice right before I got married: "think before you speak". What can I say, the man has known me since I was twelve.) This whole business about gay marriage, and heaven forbid gay adoption, is beyond mind-boggling to me. What is the big deal if gay people want to get married and adopt kids? I think they should have the opportunity to make the same mistakes and enjoy the same perks as all the rest of us.  In fact, I insist they should. But it's definitely the minority view here where I live in Florida, where we are so backwards on some things that it's a miracle that we don't live in some kind of reverse entropic state where time's arrow has been reversed. Today I was at the Juvenile Courthouse and actually heard someone praise Anita Bryant. A concept so intellectually retro that just wrapping my head around it, I'm probably getting younger while writing this post.

The Teflon Pope in Malta reassuring people.

(Image credit: Associated Press)

So earlier this week, the Teflon Pope assured us that he will take action on the sex abuse scandals rocking the Church. It's been more than a month since he spoke about the scandal that started making big waves in Ireland. He's been pretty silent about Germany, where his reputation is somewhat damaged. Then there's Brazil. Or Norway. Or Malta. Or India, a great outpost to send your pedophile priest who's under extradition. And so very many reminders of Boston. The damn Boston Globe won't shut up on the subject. The New York Times and Washington Post are also part of the axis of... well, you get it. 

Anyway, it's been a month since he last spoke about the issue and so I'm thinking Pope Benny is starting to hear that parishioners are seriously bothered. Attendance is dropping like a rock in the Catholic Church in recent times, as it is. Which also means tithing is down. Which might be even worse now, because people don't want to give money to an organization that was tacitly condoning (by not defrocking, not turning over to police pedophiles, who were then reassigned so they could molest boys and girls elsewhere). What can we say? Money talks. It talks much louder than people shouting that they or their children were molested, raped and traumatized. And so now the Teflon Pope is saying he is just so very contrite and that the Church will address these many, many (it might be better to borrow from mathematics and use a many factorial here: many!) wrongs. Friends on facebook have likened this to believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. (I love my friends...)

But in the meantime, among the faithful, or should I say the hateful, there are all these ugly rumors that swirl. That gays are pedophiles, that it isn't a Church problem, it's a gay problem. Of course it is! Gays are responsible for all the earthquakes going on (oh, wait a minute... that was promiscuous women... sorry) Heck, there's even a repellant organization called the American Family Association with a Mr. Bryan Fischer who thinks that gays can't be trusted to be on the Supreme Court because they are so very wrong, against the laws of nature and of man. (I suppose pointing out that homosexuality exists in nature and that it used to be illegal for people of different races to marry in some states and territories would be pointless...) A few of my obviously far too liberal friends made observations about Mr. Fisher's position, especially Irma who pointed out that if a gay Supreme Court justice was likely to be biased in favor of gay rights, then a heterosexual one was equally likely to be biased in favor of heterosexuals and therefore to be potentially discriminatory! (I'm sure that form of discrimination is just what Mr. Fischer had in mind, though...)

So about this business of pedophiles and gays, Dr. John Cantor has a great op-ed piece addressing the issue on CNN.com. It's a concise and trenchant analysis of the relevant medical literature which just fails to show any correlation between being gay and being a pedophile. In fact, you could easily turn his statistics on end a bit, and can see that the preponderance of pedophiles (about 70 - 80%) are heterosexual. There's a lot of hard evidence that pedophilia and hebephilia are neurodevelopment perturbations, which is a very elegant way of saying that it's a subset of brain development that is off in the tail section of the bell curve, or not average. Pedophiles and hebephiles appear to have less "white matter" in the brain. Dr. Cantor published an article in Neuropsychology on the topic in 2004, and another in the Journal of Psychiatry Research in 2008 (J Psychiatr Res. 2008 Feb; 42(3):167-83. Epub 2007 Nov 26.). Dr. Cantor's findings have been further supported by independent findings of neurodevelopmental structural differences in the brain  in Germany, published in 2007 (Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2007 Jun; 64(6):737-46.). The topic of pedophilia and brain development is thus a very loaded one. Because basically, if your brain is wired that way, you're screwed. There is no cure and, therefore, the effort expended on treating pedophiles may be completely misdirected. For instance, slapping them on the wrist and saying "bad priest" and sending them to India really isn't going to work. Taking away their access to children might seem an obvious step, but you know, nothing with the Catholic Church has ever been obvious. (Look at telling people in HIV-ridden Africa that they shouldn't use condoms, for instance...)

Anyway, since I had an argument with a long time friend the other day about homosexuality and brain differences (like they don't believe that the brain was different first, they think it became different because the people chose to be gay- just don't even get me started...) I went back and looked at some of the more recent results of brain scans of heterosexual men and women versus self-reporting homosexual men and women. Those ever liberal Swedes published a really interesting study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June 2008 (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jul 8; 105(27): 9403-8. Epub 2008 Jun 16 and of course y'all know how prestigious the National Academy of Sciences is, right?). Take a look at their summarized brain symmetry images. Compare homosexual men and heterosexual women, and homosexual women and heterosexual men. 

Covariations with the respective amygdala seed region in hetero- and homosexual subjects. The Sokoloff scale indicates T values. Clusters detected at T = 3.0 are superimposed on the standard MR image of the brain. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (copyright 2008).)

Based on the foregoing, I have definite thoughts on these results. Since they suggest neurodevelopmental hard-wiring of same-sex attraction, it would mean that this is one of those things you just can't 'cure' and that maybe it wasn't even a choice. And if we can't cure it, we should just acknowledge it and like we do with people of different races or religions or such, give people with these different brains rights if they aren't harming people because of those differences (see hard-wired differences detailed above, in contrast). Because if I'm HoM or HoW how would that difference in my brain count as being any different from my not being blue-eyed if the world was supposed to be mostly blue-eyed? Can't fix me if I don't have blue eyes, right? You can put me in contacts just like you can try to force a person who's gay into a straight lifestyle. But my eyes will still be hazel and the other guy will still be gay. And I don't think I should be told I can't marry or adopt children or keep my job or feel safe in my community just because I have hazel eyes. I really just don't. Do you?

The Anti-Palate Cleanser

Link from a Connolly...

And a link from Richard Dawkins: I Will Arrest Pope Benedict XVI

Chipped Enamel Iron, I mean Irish, Bishop Resigns

John Magee, Bishop of Cloyne has resigned, the Vatican announced today, according to the New York Times. It's been reported that the Vatican's own investigator found that Magee was involved in the cover-ups that protected Irish priests in his diocese and failed to notify the Garda (police). Evidently, an Irish government investigator says that Magee even obstructed their investigations of two pedophiles. The BBC has a lot more interesting information about this valuable and treasured member of the Irish Catholic church.

Bishop Magee, who is 73, was actually secretary to three popes. The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland (NBSC), an entity separate from the church and therefore, it seems, willing to point out its deficiencies on occasion. NBSC had some rather damning things to say about Bishop Magee's handling of two cases of sex-abusing priests according to the BBC.

Anyway, I've been checking out the website for the NBSC. They have an established guideline booklet called Standards and Guidance. I'm really hoping they send a copy to the Teflon Pope. 

Anyone not sick of the entire business should definitely take a stroll through the pages of The Irish Catholic wherein one columnist, Garry O'Sullivan congratulates Irish Bishops for having succeeded in doing what centuries of persecution have failed to do: drive people away from the Catholic church.

As an advocate for abused children, and someone who is half-Irish and whose grandparents stopped going to church for unrevealed reasons, I guess I'm just obsessed with the issue at this point. The systematic abuse, over many decades, and the cover-ups, of these pedophile priests is just beyond upsetting to me. In my mind, Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights appears to be iconographic of the moment. The thought of most of the adults in the central and right panels, being replaced by children though is rather disturbing, is it not? 


The Catholic church has long held that life is so sacred and that the unborn fetus is to be protected at all costs.

If only they'd held the same philosophy once our children were actually here...

Well the font is all messed up on this post and I will have to fix it later. Just loving Blogger this morning. Apologies to anyone who can't distinguish links properly.

On being Irish this week... and Clergy Abuse

John Kelly, abuse survivor, victim's rights advocate, hero.

(photo credit CNN)

It's ironic that in the week of St. Patrick's Day that the big Irish talk is precisely related to Catholicism. None of it is about saints. 


Above you see a photo of John Kelly, a 59 year old man with great courage who has been quite outspoken about his abuse at the hands of the church while in a reformatory in Daingean, Ireland. From his CNN interview, which was quite searing:

"I was taken down these stairs. I only had a nightdress on. It was pulled over my head. I was left naked. This 6-foot, 4-inch [tall] religious brother stood on my hands... and another guy had a whip that we made ourselves, with coins in it. And he would run from a distance to flog me," Kelly remembers.

Kelly, now 59, spent much of his childhood living in institutions run by Catholic orders in Ireland. The abuse he remembers most vividly took place at a reformatory in Daingean, in central Ireland.

"It was a very significant night for me," he says. "I'd been raped and buggered previously by these religious brothers, and I'd been physically beaten and psychologically tortured for months -- I spent two years in the place."

But Kelly reached a breaking point as one Catholic brother held him down, another whipped him and two others looked on, he says.

"I begged God to take me away. I just wanted to die to get away from the pain. And God wasn't there for me," he says.

Mr. Kelly survived. He is, not surprisingly, a nonbeliever at this point. He escaped Daingean and ran away. He spent the next thirty years in London and then returned to Ireland to campaign against child abuse. He is a hero. His voice, along with others who have spoken out, has finally helped rip the veil away from the ugly business of sex abuse and the Catholic church.


I've read with interest the various developments about the clergy in Ireland and the massive abuse scandal that has rocked the country. Of course, it isn't the first that we've heard of egregious abuses by the clergy. There are cases that stem back to the 1950's, in fact. Even the National Catholic Reporter had an article on the crisis of faith due to a sex abuse scandal involving a priest in the Portland, Oregon Archdiocese in 1983. But these cases were largely swept under the carpet. The Vatican only began to really lose its tight grip on media coverage of these issues after the scandals that rocked the US Catholic church in 2002-2005, beginning with the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize winning exposé of the sexual abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Boston. In a measure of the scope of the problem, the Globe maintains their website about the investigations and various resources for reporting and support to this day. Columbia University's DART Center, which both prepares and follows journalists who cover violence and abuse, gives high praise to the Boston Globe and uses the Globe Spotlight team as a model for investigative work on such cases. 

In reading this week about the history of investigations into the pedophilia problem in the Catholic church, a good place to start is the Wikipedia entry on Catholic Sex Abuse Cases. I guess that even with all the reading I've done, the horrors of the scope of the abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy are still just astonishing to me. One case first discussed in 1998, which I have to say seems to have been fairly well buried in the media archives (I wonder how) was mentioned by The Guardian's columnist Alexander Chancellor, earlier this week. The case, which is just so horrifyingly graphic that I will leave it to the reader's choice as to whether to follow the link, was part of the British House of Commons investigation of allegations of sexual abuse at the end hands of the Christian Brothers at Tardun Agricultural School in Western Australia. It's seems that Tardun's claim to fame (notoriety?) is the horrible facts that came from this investigation, if the Tardun Wikipedia entry is an indicator.

Late last year an investigation at BishopAccountability.org suggested that about a third of the thousands of priests in the US who have been accused of sexual abuse of minor aged parishioners are Irish. Some of the cases were delineated so clearly that BishopAccountability released more than 60 names of Irish or Irish-descent pedophile priests in their report, as reported by The Boston Globe. Of more than 3000 US priests accused of being pedophiles, about a 1000 are Irish according to their report.

On the basis of the foregoing, it's not a surprise then that the Vatican would have to do something, say something, about the situation in Ireland, where revelations of child sexual abuse started to make big media headlines starting back in the 1990's, a full decade before they started to get major media investigative time here in the US. A report initiated by the Irish government found that found the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Catholic Church authorities in Ireland had assiduously covered up child sexual abuse by priests from 1975 to 2004. With the the sex scandal now reaching Ratzinger's own Germany, it's a wonder that they weren't better prepared for the media furor over the Irish investigation. But Pope Benedict XVI seems not to quite have a handle on things. 

I waited before writing this post because I was really interested to see what, if anything, the Pope would say and offer by way of amends for his own role, under Pope John Paul II, in covering up these scandals and allowing the church to be complicit with its sexual abusers. What the Irish got is this 18 page letter, which starts out with the simply astonishing (at least to me) claim that the Pope is "deeply disturbed by the information which has come to light regarding the abuse of children and vulnerable young people by members of the church in Ireland, particularly by priests and religious." That followed by the statement "I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way church authorities in Ireland have dealt with them." I guess I'm having a really hard time with these statements. I seem to remember some of Ratzinger's work for Pope John Paul II as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Specifically, there was a 2001 Vatican edict written largely by Ratzinger that told bishops to report all cases of child abuse to Vatican authorities under strict secrecy; it did not mention reporting crimes to police.

Pope Benedict XVI, who was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, has yet to speak about the hundreds of abuse cases emerging since January in Germany. Among these is the case of Peter Hullermann, a priest who was already suspected of abusing boys in the western city of Essen when Archbishop Ratzinger approved his transfer to Munich for treatment in 1980. While in Munich, Hullermann was allowed contact with children virtually right after his "therapy" began. He was once again (surprise!) accused of molesting boys and was convicted in 1986 of sexual abuse. How bad was Peter Hullermann? Werner Huth, the psychoanalyst working with Hullerman has gone on record in the German popular press saying that he specifically demanded the priest never be allowed to interact with children again. What did the Church do to root out this evil predator? Was he defrocked? Of course not! He was suspended this week for ignoring a 2008 church order not to work with youths. That's right, Peter Hullermann is still a priest.

So go ahead and listen to the Pope's (who I'm going to call the Teflon Pope) letter, because if the foregoing doesn't stick and make him step aside as his own mea culpa for his role in covering up some of the worst abuse you can visit on children, I don't know what will.

 

Is there any possible compensation for the abuse that children have endured at the hands of not just the perpetrators, but at their ultimate betrayers, the highest levels of the Catholic church that allowed this abuse to continue? I'd be hard-pressed to think of any. At the very least, maybe the wealthiest religious organization in the world could open its coffers and pay for some therapy for its victims? And maybe they could do it before class action lawsuits force them to? Or maybe that would just be too divine. I mean, what do you think, that the man is speaking with the voice of God or something?