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

You go Richard!

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

PopeSlam

Gary Forsythe for Protest State Funding of UK 2010 Visit by Pope 

The Pope visits the UK this week. He arrives tomorrow. He'll be in Glasgow, where I have a friend who I know won't be queueing up to see him, Edinburgh, London and Birmingham. It seems like the fading of all the harsh media coverage of Pope Benedict, and the Catholic Church itself, over the summer has not resulted in short public memories. In fact, it seems like the Pope is going to have a bumpy ride... Because people are just not letting this whole pedophile thing go, are they? Geeez.

To wit, this article in today's Guardian points out that many of the priests who have been jailed in England and Wales as pedophiles have, in fact, remained in the priesthood and still receive financial support from the Catholic Church. In an exposé on the UK's Channel 4 news program, journalists investigated whether or not the Church was following recommendations of the Nolan Report of 2001. That report recommended that any priest that was sentenced to a year or more than of jail time because of conviction on sexual abuse charges should be cast out (laicized) from the Catholic Church. However, as Channel 4 is reporting this evening in the UK,

"At least 14 of the 22 priests who have served a year or more behind bars are still members of the clergy and 10 of these appear in the most recent edition of the Catholic Directory, the official yearbook of the church. Only eight of the 22 men have been dismissed from their positions.

One of those featured in tonight's programme, Fr John Coughlan, was jailed in 2005. Although he no longer leads services, he is still a priest and lives in church-owned property. He refused to appear on camera but said he was "in limbo" and that he was in touch with other priests who were in a similar situation.

His home is in the diocese of Westminster, which is run by Vincent Nichols, who is the most senior Catholic in the country and who played a pivotal part in developing child protection policies for the church. He has frequently said the Catholic church in England and Wales leads the way in child protection."

- from The Guardian

I don't know about you, but that last sentence just left me ill.

The outcry across the UK is loud and strong, however. And some of it is rather high profile. Here's a letter posted in Today's Guardian:

We, the undersigned, share the view that Pope Ratzinger should not be given the honour of a state visit to this country. We believe that the pope, as a citizen of Europe and the leader of a religion with many adherents in the UK, is of course free to enter and tour our country. However, as well as a religious leader, the pope is a head of state, and the state and organisation of which he is head has been responsible for:

● Opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of AIDS.

● Promoting segregated education.

● Denying abortion to even the most vulnerable women.

● Opposing equal rights for lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

● Failing to address the many cases of abuse of children within its own organisation.

The state of which the pope is head has also resisted signing many major human rights treaties and has formed its own treaties ("concordats") with many states which negatively affect the human rights of citizens of those states. In any case, we reject the masquerading of the Holy See as a state and the pope as a head of state as merely a convenient fiction to amplify the international influence of the Vatican.

Stephen Fry, Professor Richard Dawkins, Professor Susan Blackmore, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Ed Byrne, Baroness Blackstone, Ken Follett, Professor AC Grayling, Stewart Lee, Baroness Massey, Claire Rayner, Adele Anderson, John Austin MP, Lord Avebury, Sian Berry, Professor Simon Blackburn, Sir David Blatherwick, Sir Tom Blundell, Dr Helena Cronin, Dylan Evans, Hermione Eyre, Lord Foulkes, Professor Chris French, Natalie Haynes, Johann Hari, Jon Holmes, Lord Hughes, Robin Ince, Dr Michael Irwin, Professor Steve Jones, Sir Harold Kroto, Professor John Lee, Zoe Margolis, Jonathan Meades, Sir Jonathan Miller, Diane Munday, Maryam Namazie, David Nobbs, Professor Richard Norman, Lord O'Neill, Simon Price, Paul Rose, Martin Rowson, Michael Rubenstein, Joan Smith, Dr Harry Stopes-Roe, Professor Raymond Tallis, Lord Taverne, Peter Tatchell, Baroness Turner, Professor Lord Wedderburn of Charlton QC FBA, Ann Marie Waters, Professor Wolpert, Jane Wynne Willson

(I was so delighted to see Harold Kroto, a chemist whose work I heard about regularly while I was getting my PhD, on that list. Who knew?)

There is growing opposition as well to the fact that a state visit would be funded with British taxpayer monies, to the tune of a reported £1.5M for police protection alone. First Post estimated back in March the total cost of the Pope's visit may run to £20M at least at least £13M of which is already known to be on the taxpayer's pence.  Of course that was before all the 'complaints' calendared for 2010 worsened, as the Vatican itself, and dioceses not just in Ireland, but in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil and India, began to be accused of covering up pedophile priests, and the level of anger increased. Now it's likely going to be even more exorbitant, if the CNN article is to be believed. A lot of people really actively dislike the Pope. In fact, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have said that they'd like to see him arrested for crimes against humanity. (It's no surprise, therefore, that Dawkins is the second signatory on the letter to the Guardian stating that the Pope shouldn't receive a state visit.)

And why does the Vatican's man rank a state visit? Distinguished human rights attorney Geoffrey Robertson looks at the legal side in a column in the Guardian. It seems the reason the Holy See gets treated as a state is because of the Lateran Treaty signed in 1927 with none other than Benito Mussolini. And the UK wasn't even a party to the treaty. Robertson is the author of The Case of the Pope, which has been termed "a coolly devastating inquiry into the Vatican's handling of Child Abuse."  From Eagleton's review:

"The first child sex scandal in the Catholic church took place in AD153, long before there was a "gay culture" or Jewish journalists for bishops to blame it on. By the 1960s, the problem had become so dire that a cleric responsible for the care of "erring" priests wrote to the Vatican suggesting that it acquire a Caribbean island to put them on."

The Case of the Pope releases on September 29. I know what I'll be reading come the end of the month...

Frankly, I'm thinking the reason for the state visit is state protection. When John Paul II visited the UK in 1982 the visit was pastoral and presumably the Vatican picked up the bulk of the cost. But Pope Benedict has a lot of people who really wish he and his Church and his pedophile priests would just go away. 

So centuries of misdeeds on the part of the Church he represents result in their need for taxpayer funded protection?

You bet. And how wrong is that?

© 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

The Anti-Palate Cleanser

Link from a Connolly...

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

On being being prickly, Irish, worthy of abuse, and Team Constance

Last week, Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor had a great column in the Washington Post. It was so great, so complete, and so pointed that I really didn't think I could blog about it at all. It felt like it would be superfluous or diminishing. I'm sure just about everyone who's reading this blog remembers 1992, when Sinéad O'Connor tore up a photo of JPII on Saturday Night Live while singing, a capella in her rich Irish mezzo, Bob Marley's War. "Fight the real enemy", she said as she shredded the photo. So much of her column stayed with me. I emailed the address she provided. I told her she was great and I was proud to be an O'Leary and Irish, along with her. 

Sinéad O'Connor, 1992, NBC (Saturday Night Live)

In her column, she asked, whether "Irish Catholics, because we daren't say 'we deserve better,' should be treated as though we deserve less" in response to the Teflon Pope's wholly inadequate apology for the decades long events that are still being revealed in Ireland. The events that despite the growing number of reports in places like Norway, the US (just google it, okay- there are way too many to choose from and I don't want anyone to feel singled or left out), Germany and even probably in India (nothing like knowing how to convert people, right?), the Teflon Pope seemed to suggest were just an Irish problem. Well, this week, a lot of people seemed to deserve so much better than what they got.

As one site, Get Religion, claims, the press just doesn't get religion... Of course, I suppose there have been all manner of defenses of the Catholic Church, which definitely in my mind, still isn't quite getting what it deserves. Defenses or should I say... offenses, when trying to defend the indefensible? For instance, the Bishop of Tenerife is really just outstanding in his claim that some of the adolescents were consenting and therefore it was okay for supposedly sworn to celibacy priests to have molested them. Though, in fairness, the Vatican went out of its way to distance itself from the Brazilian Cardinal Scherer, who spoke about exorcism rather than incarceration as the solution the other day. And they also tried to do the same (though it was a bit harder to do that with their own elected defender who spoke in an unprecedented fashion right before the Teflon Pope on Easter Sunday Mass), with Father Cantalamesso, who likened the persecution of Jews to the present "persecution" of the Church over the fact that they've sheltered pedophiles for decades if not centuries. (Of course, the Brazilian Catholic Church holds an especially cherished place in my thoughts because of their opposition to the abortion obtained by the 9 year old who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Did I mention they ex-communicated the mother, the child, and the doctors that saved the 9 year old child from delivering twins? They didn't, as I understand it, ex-communicate the stepfather. I have a lot of wonderful Brazilian friends but somehow I just don't have friendly feelings for the Catholic Church there, which has the largest number of Catholics of any country in the world. Yeah, it's an old story from last year, but still, talk about not getting what you deserve, for anyone involved.) 

Yesterday, as Maureen Dowd so 'adversarially' pointed out, "How can we maintain... faith when our leaders are unworthy of it?" How perfectly she captures not just the Church but even politics at this juncture, or even... public high schools in Mississippi and Massachusetts where there are further examples still of people not getting what they deserved. Sometimes I find Maureen a bit... edgy. I've always enjoyed her fire and ire, though sometimes I think she gets abrasive and deters some of the choir. And I think she knows that about herself. Because she got her brother Kevin, who's evidently really devout, to give her comments on the situation with the Catholic Church, Ireland, and the Teflon Pope. His comments, “In pedophilia, the church has unleashed upon itself a plague that threatens its very future, and yet it remains in a curious state of denial," are rather daunting when you consider that she describes him as truly one of the faithful. 

But I find what Maureen Dowd says to be true, across the board this week. "Our leaders are unworthy." Whether we're talking about Phoebe Prince (latest), whose face and fate just linger in my mind. She was the child who it seems didn't dare say she deserved better and whose school faculty, administration and fellow students didn't seem to think she deserved better either.

Phoebe Prince, CBS News

Or Constance McMillen, on whose behalf, along with so many other teens and adults who are persecuted for their sexual orientation, I just signed an ACLU petition to my legislators. (I'm sure those of you who have kept up know about how Constance was tricked into attending a decoy prom so that she definitely wouldn't attend the real prom arranged privately by other students and their parents from her school. They even made a Facebook page called "Quit Yer Crying Constance" and posted photos of themselves at the real prom, and some of the students were all bent out of shape when their public Facebook photos were picked up and maligned all over the blogosphere. Like so many others who are Team Constance, I fanned the mean page so that I could post to say I love Constance and I'm not afraid of a girl in a tuxedo.)

Constance McMillen

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

The bad press for the Catholic Church and the Teflon Pope just spins on and on. While South Hadley High and Itawamba Agricultural High School certainly aren't in the same league as an organization covering for pedophiles, I'm not left feeling appreciably better about whoever it is that's running things. It certainly doesn't seem like a higher power should be letting all these many, many things, both great and 'small', go so very wrong. 


I guess in my rather tenuous belief system, if I have faith in anything it's that cruelty in any form is just plain wrong. 

Biding Time, and the wonders of Philip Pullman

Well, I have to admit that the whole business about Phoebe really has stuck with me long and hard this week. I keep thinking about the poor girl and the incredible and intentional cruelty she seemed to have endured, along with the even more incredible indifference of the adults in her school who witnessed some of it.

The week is getting away from me and, as I read article after article in the US and international press about the Teflon Rat, I mean Pope, and the defense of the Catholic Church, I am so offended and yet feel as if it would be wrong to set myself up as the ranting anti-Catholic blogger because the scope would just be too damn narrow.

A draining week thus far... So busy with issues for the new house and for work related things that I've had little time to write. Worried about the youngest going off to a school trip on Friday through Sunday and his perpetual tendency, and temptation, to crash off the gluten-free diet.

How I'm feeling:

The Martyr of Solway by John Everett Millais

The reality:

Things are pretty much on the upswing, even if I want to kill my windows and door people. Kinda sorta. And well... there's all this other drama going on but I must be discreet. Sigh.

Yes, I need to have some breathing room. But on the positive side, I received my gorgeous copy of Pullman's new book from the UK this afternoon. I'm just so excited. So I'll pop back later and rant some more about the Teflon Pope, the dangers of stepparents visiting Kyrgyzstan (is a Stan tour complete without going there? Hell yes, I hope) and how amazed I am that Pullman's YA fiction is still under the radar in the US. Nothing like books to spread reason, I mean sedition, where the church is concered.

Resolving My Attention Deficit and the Cruelty of Children

After crawling back home from Seattle last night shortly before midnight, I'm faced this morning with the urgent need to write something to satisfy my craving to write. But where to start? The plethora of material is just daunting. There's the Teflon Pope's Easter Week Vatican backlash against the NY Times which is now making allusions to the Holocaust and persecution of Jews (and I am just so impressed with the Vatican on this one...), or the Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams (who liked one of my all time favorite fantasy series, His Dark Materials so how cool is he) dissing the Irish Catholic Church on lack of credibility or the Obama administration's offshore drilling proposals, or their take on wiretaps or the ultimate Mean Girl scenario in Massachusetts or a food post on seafood in Florida (supposedly local but not) or iPad frenzy.

I guess I'm going to have to go with Phoebe. Back in January, fifteen year old Phoebe Prince hanged herself following months of bullying. Nine youths have been charged as being involved in her death. 

I'm really having such a hard time with this story. My child is routinely bullied at school both for his short stature and his immature social skill set. Meanly bullied. He's the original short fuse child and has so many triggers, having been adopted at age 8 and having had enough bad stuff happen to him by then to last an entire lifetime and still have some left over. So really, the bullying thing, so very not okay with me. His school is middling supportive. Especially after I informed them about the tenth grade kid who was harassing him by grabbing his butt last year in the hallways and said if it happened again, I'd call the police and file a report alleging assault. Yeah, that one kind of got their attention. They knew I meant it. Must have been the menace in my voice. Oh wait. Must have been the fact that I'm involved in the child welfare court system. Yeah. That one.

And so I relate to the whole issue of bullying from the perspective of a parent. Schools are so prone to not finding ways to handle things deftly on this issue. And even when things go very and tragically wrong, they deny all culpability. You have to be really aggressive to get progress on bullying of your children and then you have to hope that the school itself doesn't bully your child. After all, I'm lucky in that my child is in a private school that costs a fortune. I can always use that angle, the one where I'm paying you to take care of, not allow wholesale abuse of, my child, to safeguard him after I've complained. But what options did Phoebe's parents have? They reported it twice to the school and if you believe the investigative report in the NY Times there is ample evidence that the school faculty, administration and even nurse knew this beautiful child was being abused. And for what? She slept with two boys? She spoke with a brogue? A boy who liked her was promised to a cool set girl and she trespassed by default because he asked her out? How cruel would a band of youths have to be to make a child hang herself? She was insulted openly in the classrooms and even in front of unmoved faculty. She was harassed in person, by phone and online. 

The District Attorney in this case has taken a lot of heat in the Massachusetts press for some of the charges filed against the nine youths. Especially the statutory rape charges against the 17 and 18 year old boys who were involved with her and then joined to varying extents in the bullying by speaking badly of her. And then there are the seven girls who are charged. Some are charged as minors and some as adults. The felony charges include violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. According to reports in the Times, District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel was quoted as saying “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome, but did not violate any laws." 

So what's a parent to do when their child is bullied this badly? Call the police? Hire an attorney or go to Legal Aid? I guess I'd have done all that. But that would be if my child reveals the extent of his or her suffering, which all too often youths are afraid to do. For instance, I found out about that butt-grabbing harassment only by chance, following up on a passing comment by my child and his wanting to take a different route to go retrieve something from his locker when I picked him up at school one afternoon. I asked why he was taking a much longer route and pressed and pressed until he told me why. It turned out that a teacher had witnessed my child getting this abuse and said nothing. In fact, another teacher had reported my son for striking his abuser in retaliation for his being grabbed by the much older and bigger boy! Kids in this age range have to rely on attentive adults, who look out for them. Like school staff who are there to see it happening. I really have to question what the faculty and administration thought was happening when they saw Phoebe Prince repeatedly in tears and having so much trouble coping day after miserable day. I mean yeah, we're all just human and maybe they didn't know it was so very, very bad. But someone should have thought to ask what was going on, what could be done to make it better. It's just astonishing to think that a 15 year old girl hung herself and then they noticed they had a problem. Talk about attention deficit...

So I'll get back to the Teflon Pope later. For the present, I'm just going to ruminate on what savages children can be. And how there's still something so dark in all of us that we can be so cruel as a species. And how utterly indifferent people can become to suffering. 

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.