Apr

18

The truth is that child abuse and cover-up are not primarily about religion or sex. They are about power

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In a week when the Pope’s right-hand man pointed to homosexuality as the cause of paedophilia, FINTAN O’TOOLE looks at the church’s response to the child abuse cover-up and asks what it is all about

THERE IS A word that became current towards the fag end of the Northern Ireland conflict, when evil had been reduced to banalities. An atrocity against one community would often be met on the other side, not with either outright support or condemnation but with “what-aboutery”. Yes, some would shrug, this is terrible but what about Bloody Sunday? What about Enniskillen? What about Cromwell?

That this form of moral evasion had its very own name was a mark of how pitiful and desperate it was. Even those who engaged in it knew that it was a last refuge. When the indefensible could not be defended, the only remaining strategy was to present the perpetrators as victims, and those who criticised atrocities as hypocrites.

As evidenced by this week’s attempt by Pope Benedict’s right-hand man, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, to blame homosexuals for the crisis in the church, what-aboutery is now the mainstay of the Vatican’s response to the continuing revelation of its global strategy of covering up the abuse of children by priests.

For a short period leading up to the issuing of Pope Benedict’s pastoral letter to the Irish faithful last month, the Vatican seemed to be inching towards some tentative reflection on its own moral responsibility for the protection of abusers. But as the flood of allegations has risen ever closer to the Pope’s own door, humility has been replaced by an aggressive backlash.

The church leadership has now adopted a three-fold strategy: blame the victims; invoke anti-Catholic persecution; and identify modernity as the root of the problem. Benedict himself began the process of blaming the victims in his Palm Sunday sermon when he spoke of not allowing oneself to be “intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion”. This was not an accidental or thoughtless phrase. It was directly echoed on Easter Sunday by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, former Vatican secretary of state and currently dean of the College of Cardinals.

He urged Benedict not to be dismayed by “the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes assail the community of believers”. In one magisterial phrase, the stories of those who were attacked as children and the demands for accountability are dismissed as malicious tittle-tattle.

The next step of painting the church leadership, not as powerful people with questions to answer, but as innocent victims of persecution, was taken by the preacher to the papal household, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa.

Showing that no strategy is too tasteless to be deployed, he cited a letter from a “Jewish friend”, comparing attacks on the church’s record on child abuse to “the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism”. Cantalamessa himself linked demands for accountability in the church to the “herd psychology” and the search for a scapegoat through which “the weakest element, the different one” is victimised. The ironies in this exercise in self-pity are almost beyond satire.

Redefining the Pope, his cardinals and his bishops as the “weakest” members of society would be peculiar in any context. But in the context of child abuse, it is grotesque. And claiming the status of “the different one”, the outsider who suffers from stereotyping and discrimination, is a bit rich for a church that is happy to perpetuate, as Bertone did this week, the vile stereotype that identifies homosexuality and paedophilia.

If the church insists on drawing analogies with anti-Semitism, it might be well advised to avoid the subject of its attitudes to gay people altogether.

Underlying all of this, however, is a more considered strategy of constructing an intellectual framework within which an official narrative of the crisis can emerge. That narrative is self-consciously reactionary. The church was fine when it had authority in society. That authority was challenged by liberalism, free thinking and sexual openness, and paedophilia is the result.

In his pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, Benedict could not have been more explicit about this. He urged the faithful to understand the crisis as a consequence of “new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularisation of Irish society”.

“Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values.”

As an explanation for paedophile priests and for the abysmal institutional response to their crimes, this bears hardly a moment’s scrutiny.

In the Irish context alone, we know from the Ryan report that systematic child abuse by Catholic brothers, priests and nuns goes back at the very least to the 1930s and almost certainly beyond. We know from the Murphy report that “there is a two thousand year history of Biblical, Papal and Holy See statements showing awareness of clerical child sex abuse . . . it is clear that cases were dealt with by Archbishop McQuaid in the 1950s and 1960s”.

And even if one were to accept the highly dubious contention that paedophile priests are a result of the move towards greater sexual openness from the 1960s onwards, how would that explain the most damaging aspect of the scandal – the cover-up by bishops and the Vatican?

These strategies may be as desperate as they are clumsily evasive. But they are arguably necessary to the survival of the church’s current power structures. For if the organised cover-up of child abuse is not about petty gossip, not about victimising a defenceless Pope and not about secular modernity, what is it about? This is a question to which Benedict cannot give an honest answer because that answer would threaten the very system he embodies.

Some liberal critics of the church often fail to answer the question, too. They may blame Catholicism itself, as if other belief systems did not end up justifying vile crimes. They may blame celibacy, as if the vast majority of attacks on children were not perpetrated by non-celibates – often, indeed, by the child’s own parents. The truth is that child abuse and cover-up are not primarily about religion or sex. They are about power. The bleak lessons of human history are that those who have too much power will abuse it. And that organisations will put their own interests above those of the victims.

THE BEHAVIOUR OF the institutional Catholic church in Ireland and around the world is certainly a stark example of both of these truths. But it is not the only example, even in contemporary Ireland. The Irish Amateur Swimming Association, for example, gave coaches the power to do what they liked to children and then engaged in a process of denial that was, albeit on a much smaller scale, essentially the same as that of the bishops.

The problem is not swimming, any more than it is Catholicism. It is power.

The church’s combination of temporal authority, spiritual control and a closed, internal hierarchy created the power that corrupted it. The backlash of the past few weeks has merely confirmed what was already overwhelmingly likely: that Benedict is entirely incapable of grasping this reality, let alone altering it. He has spent much of his career crushing dissent and rolling back the anti-hierarchical spirit of Vatican 2. His solution, as he suggested in his pastoral letter, is more of the same – more obedience, more authority, more resistance to secular modernity.

Those who looked to the Pope to respond to one of the most profound crises in the history of the church now know they will have to look elsewhere.

Apr

17

Church in worst credibility crisis since Reformation, theologian tells bishops

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The Irish Times – Friday, April 16, 2010
Church in worst credibility crisis since Reformation, theologian tells bishops
HANS KÜNG

Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is wrong with the Roman Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open letter to all Catholic bishops

VENERABLE BISHOPS,

Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and I were the youngest theologians at the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965. Now we are the oldest and the only ones still fully active. I have always understood my theological work as a service to the Roman Catholic Church. For this reason, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I am making this appeal to you in an open letter. In doing so, I am motivated by my profound concern for our church, which now finds itself in the worst credibility crisis since the Reformation. Please excuse the form of an open letter; unfortunately, I have no other way of reaching you.

I deeply appreciated that the pope invited me, his outspoken critic, to meet for a friendly, four-hour-long conversation shortly after he took office. This awakened in me the hope that my former colleague at Tubingen University might find his way to promote an ongoing renewal of the church and an ecumenical rapprochement in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

Unfortunately, my hopes and those of so many engaged Catholic men and women have not been fulfilled. And in my subsequent correspondence with the pope, I have pointed this out to him many times. Without a doubt, he conscientiously performs his everyday duties as pope, and he has given us three helpful encyclicals on faith, hope and charity. But when it comes to facing the major challenges of our times, his pontificate has increasingly passed up more opportunities than it has taken:

Missed is the opportunity for rapprochement with the Protestant churches: Instead, they have been denied the status of churches in the proper sense of the term and, for that reason, their ministries are not recognized and intercommunion is not possible.

Missed is the opportunity for the long-term reconciliation with the Jews: Instead the pope has reintroduced into the liturgy a preconciliar prayer for the enlightenment of the Jews, he has taken notoriously anti-Semitic and schismatic bishops back into communion with the church, and he is actively promoting the beatification of Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of not offering sufficient protections to Jews in Nazi Germany.

The fact is, Benedict sees in Judaism only the historic root of Christianity; he does not take it seriously as an ongoing religious community offering its own path to salvation. The recent comparison of the current criticism faced by the pope with anti-Semitic hate campaigns – made by Rev Raniero Cantalamessa during an official Good Friday service at the Vatican – has stirred up a storm of indignation among Jews around the world.

Missed is the opportunity for a dialogue with Muslims in an atmosphere of mutual trust: Instead, in his ill-advised but symptomatic 2006 Regensburg lecture, Benedict caricatured Islam as a religion of violence and inhumanity and thus evoked enduring Muslim mistrust.

Missed is the opportunity for reconciliation with the colonised indigenous peoples of Latin America: Instead, the pope asserted in all seriousness that they had been “longing” for the religion of their European conquerors.

Missed is the opportunity to help the people of Africa by allowing the use of birth control to fight overpopulation and condoms to fight the spread of HIV.

Missed is the opportunity to make peace with modern science by clearly affirming the theory of evolution and accepting stem-cell research.

Missed is the opportunity to make the spirit of the Second Vatican Council the compass for the whole Catholic Church, including the Vatican itself, and thus to promote the needed reforms in the church.

This last point, respected bishops, is the most serious of all. Time and again, this pope has added qualifications to the conciliar texts and interpreted them against the spirit of the council fathers. Time and again, he has taken an express stand against the Ecumenical Council, which according to canon law represents the highest authority in the Catholic Church:

He has taken the bishops of the traditionalist Pius X Society back into the church without any preconditions – bishops who were illegally consecrated outside the Catholic Church and who reject central points of the Second Vatican Council (including liturgical reform, freedom of religion and the rapprochement with Judaism).

He promotes the medieval Tridentine Mass by all possible means and occasionally celebrates the Eucharist in Latin with his back to the congregation.

He refuses to put into effect the rapprochement with the Anglican Church, which was laid out in official ecumenical documents by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and has attempted instead to lure married Anglican clergy into the Roman Catholic Church by freeing them from the very rule of celibacy that has forced tens of thousands of Roman Catholic priests out of office.

He has actively reinforced the anti-conciliar forces in the church by appointing reactionary officials to key offices in the Curia (including the secretariat of state, and positions in the liturgical commission) while appointing reactionary bishops around the world.

Pope Benedict XVI seems to be increasingly cut off from the vast majority of church members who pay less and less heed to Rome and, at best, identify themselves only with their local parish and bishop.

I know that many of you are pained by this situation. In his anti-conciliar policy, the pope receives the full support of the Roman Curia. The Curia does its best to stifle criticism in the episcopate and in the church as a whole and to discredit critics with all the means at its disposal. With a return to pomp and spectacle catching the attention of the media, the reactionary forces in Rome have attempted to present us with a strong church fronted by an absolutistic “Vicar of Christ” who combines the church’s legislative, executive and judicial powers in his hands alone. But Benedict’s policy of restoration has failed. All of his spectacular appearances, demonstrative journeys and public statements have failed to influence the opinions of most Catholics on controversial issues. This is especially true regarding matters of sexual morality. Even the papal youth meetings, attended above all by conservative-charismatic groups, have failed to hold back the steady drain of those leaving the church or to attract more vocations to the priesthood.

You in particular, as bishops, have reason for deep sorrow: Tens of thousands of priests have resigned their office since the Second Vatican Council, for the most part because of the celibacy rule. Vocations to the priesthood, but also to religious orders, sisterhoods and lay brotherhoods are down – not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Resignation and frustration are spreading rapidly among both the clergy and the active laity. Many feel that they have been left in the lurch with their personal needs, and many are in deep distress over the state of the church. In many of your dioceses, it is the same story: increasingly empty churches, empty seminaries and empty rectories. In many countries, due to the lack of priests, more and more parishes are being merged, often against the will of their members, into ever larger “pastoral units,” in which the few surviving pastors are completely overtaxed. This is church reform in pretense rather than fact!

And now, on top of these many crises comes a scandal crying out to heaven – the revelation of the clerical abuse of thousands of children and adolescents, first in the United States, then in Ireland and now in Germany and other countries. And to make matters worse, the handling of these cases has given rise to an unprecedented leadership crisis and a collapse of trust in church leadership.

There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005). During the reign of Pope John Paul II, that congregation had already taken charge of all such cases under oath of strictest silence. Ratzinger himself, on May 18th, 2001, sent a solemn document to all the bishops dealing with severe crimes ( “epistula de delictis gravioribus” ), in which cases of abuse were sealed under the “secretum pontificium” , the violation of which could entail grave ecclesiastical penalties. With good reason, therefore, many people have expected a personal mea culpa on the part of the former prefect and current pope. Instead, the pope passed up the opportunity afforded by Holy Week: On Easter Sunday, he had his innocence proclaimed “urbi et orbi” by the dean of the College of Cardinals.

The consequences of all these scandals for the reputation of the Catholic Church are disastrous. Important church leaders have already admitted this. Numerous innocent and committed pastors and educators are suffering under the stigma of suspicion now blanketing the church. You, reverend bishops, must face up to the question: What will happen to our church and to your diocese in the future? It is not my intention to sketch out a new program of church reform. That I have done often enough both before and after the council. Instead, I want only to lay before you six proposals that I am convinced are supported by millions of Catholics who have no voice in the current situation.

1. Do not keep silent: By keeping silent in the face of so many serious grievances, you taint yourselves with guilt. When you feel that certain laws, directives and measures are counterproductive, you should say this in public. Send Rome not professions of your devotion, but rather calls for reform!

2. Set about reform: Too many in the church and in the episcopate complain about Rome, but do nothing themselves. When people no longer attend church in a diocese, when the ministry bears little fruit, when the public is kept in ignorance about the needs of the world, when ecumenical co-operation is reduced to a minimum, then the blame cannot simply be shoved off on Rome. Whether bishop, priest, layman or laywoman – everyone can do something for the renewal of the church within his own sphere of influence, be it large or small. Many of the great achievements that have occurred in the individual parishes and in the church at large owe their origin to the initiative of an individual or a small group. As bishops, you should support such initiatives and, especially given the present situation, you should respond to the just complaints of the faithful.

3. Act in a collegial way: After heated debate and against the persistent opposition of the Curia, the Second Vatican Council decreed the collegiality of the pope and the bishops. It did so in the sense of the Acts of the Apostles, in which Peter did not act alone without the college of the apostles. In the post-conciliar era, however, the pope and the Curia have ignored this decree. Just two years after the council, Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical defending the controversial celibacy law without the slightest consultation of the bishops. Since then, papal politics and the papal magisterium have continued to act in the old, uncollegial fashion. Even in liturgical matters, the pope rules as an autocrat over and against the bishops. He is happy to surround himself with them as long as they are nothing more than stage extras with neither voices nor voting rights. This is why, venerable bishops, you should not act for yourselves alone, but rather in the community of the other bishops, of the priests and of the men and women who make up the church.

4. Unconditional obedience is owed to God alone: Although at your episcopal consecration you had to take an oath of unconditional obedience to the pope, you know that unconditional obedience can never be paid to any human authority; it is due to God alone. For this reason, you should not feel impeded by your oath to speak the truth about the current crisis facing the church, your diocese and your country. Your model should be the apostle Paul, who dared to oppose Peter “to his face since he was manifestly in the wrong”! ( Galatians 2:11 ). Pressuring the Roman authorities in the spirit of Christian fraternity can be permissible and even necessary when they fail to live up to the spirit of the Gospel and its mission. The use of the vernacular in the liturgy, the changes in the regulations governing mixed marriages, the affirmation of tolerance, democracy and human rights, the opening up of an ecumenical approach, and the many other reforms of Vatican II were only achieved because of tenacious pressure from below.

5. Work for regional solutions: The Vatican has frequently turned a deaf ear to the well-founded demands of the episcopate, the priests and the laity. This is all the more reason for seeking wise regional solutions. As you are well aware, the rule of celibacy, which was inherited from the Middle Ages, represents a particularly delicate problem. In the context of today’s clerical abuse scandal, the practice has been increasingly called into question. Against the expressed will of Rome, a change would appear hardly possible; yet this is no reason for passive resignation. When a priest, after mature consideration, wishes to marry, there is no reason why he must automatically resign his office when his bishop and his parish choose to stand behind him. Individual episcopal conferences could take the lead with regional solutions. It would be better, however, to seek a solution for the whole church, therefore:

6. Call for a council: Just as the achievement of liturgical reform, religious freedom, ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue required an ecumenical council, so now a council is needed to solve the dramatically escalating problems calling for reform. In the century before the Reformation, the Council of Constance decreed that councils should be held every five years. Yet the Roman Curia successfully managed to circumvent this ruling. There is no question that the Curia, fearing a limitation of its power, would do everything in its power to prevent a council coming together in the present situation. Thus it is up to you to push through the calling of a council or at least a representative assembly of bishops.

With the church in deep crisis, this is my appeal to you, venerable bishops: Put to use the episcopal authority that was reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council. In this urgent situation, the eyes of the world turn to you. Innumerable people have lost their trust in the Catholic Church. Only by openly and honestly reckoning with these problems and resolutely carrying out needed reforms can their trust be regained. With all due respect, I beg you to do your part – together with your fellow bishops as far as possible, but also alone if necessary – in apostolic “fearlessness” ( Acts 4:29, 31 ). Give your faithful signs of hope and encouragement and give our church a perspective for the future.

With warm greetings in the community of the Christian faith,

Yours, Hans Küng – (New York Times Syndicate) © Hans Küng

Mar

27

Church must respect State law ahead of its own rules

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Bruce Arnold

We have reached a point of surfeit over abuse. The story spreads worldwide, now involving Germany, South America, the United States again, with the Milwaukee revelations. There are constant fresh episodes here We can always trump what happens elsewhere with worse here. If it is deaf children, we had worse in Ireland where boys were sexually abused over decades, and the girls suffered mindless cruelty.

Disabled children? The same. We allowed a massive culture of abuse to develop, the Church part of it, but by no means the whole, since the people, together with their guardians – the State, the Law and the Police – simply allowed it to happen. Even today, politicians, including party leaders, are ignoring their role in putting right deeply flawed social structures that have failed.

The public appetite has become choked with stories from the abuse saga. With notable exceptions it is largely relegated to ‘inside pages’. The media is running out of language.

Abuse is history. Material facts continue to be unearthed but from the past and shrouded in perpetually dishonest excuses by the Church, claiming it was not clear about what abuse meant and why it happened.

As a child at school in the 1940s I read about abuse in The People and the News of the World. I was advised by my father to avoid men with beards! The predatory nature of adult sexual desire for children was recognised and warned against. Prison sentences were published. Even in Ireland the crime was known. Dermot Ferriter, in his 2009 History of Ireland, writes: ‘cases [of child abuse] were reported in newspapers, though the language used was often circumspect and barristers had a tendency to announce they would not ‘go into the gruesome details’.

What is exceptional to this is the law. It is part of the present. It is reality and not just history; it is the duty of the lawmakers to ensure that it remains up to date. It is their duty to address it, reform it and change it. It must accommodate what it failed to accommodate throughout the State’s history.

On abuse, the law has been a shy handmaiden to the Church, fobbed off with the idea that an alternative law, the one administered and shaped by the Vatican, was a suitable protection for children. It has proved the opposite. Rather than protect children it has been their insidious enemy. In Ireland the extent is infinitely greater than in other countries because the lawmakers and those who implement the law have accepted the Church’s rule in the State and have largely failed to use civil and criminal law as it was made to be used, against grievous and sustained criminal behaviour by generation after generation of priests and others.

This issue, of there being two laws operating in the State, one managed and applied by the Church, the other by our courts and the police, requires to be digested and its elements fundamentally reformed. And to do this we need to separate it from the abuse saga, isolate it as an ongoing problem, debate it and bring in a new charter for change and reform.

Unless we do so, Canon Law will remain in operation as the Church’s first resort, impeding total transparency and immediate reporting of the abuse that has so riveted attention, yet has done so in a singularly distorted way.

In a speech last Saturday Alan Shatter put this situation in the context of the Children’s Rights Amendment to the Constitution, really only a starting point. People are not easily governed by the Constitution; they need laws to underpin its principles. And this is emphatically so over the state of the law in respect of child abuse.

Shatter comments: ‘there has been an eerie and deafening silence from government’. He goes on: ‘To date the government has neither expressed support for the proposed amendment nor specified a date for the holding of the required referendum.’

‘Leave it to the Church to sort itself out’ is the approach of politicians.

We are dealing, as this notably outspoken public representative has repeatedly told us, with ‘saga-length’ scandal, with lip-service and with failure, both by the State and the Roman Catholic Church. The reforms needed are crucial and go beyond constitutional amendment. They affect the law in detail and in substance, yet no Cabinet Minister from the Taoiseach down contributed to the recent Dail debate on the proposed constitutional change, and this included the Minister for Justice, who was a member of the Children’s Rights Committee, and has been vocal about not allowing the clerical collar to be a defence of abusers. Notably absent also was Paul Gogarty of the Green Party, paid €20,000 year to chair the Joint Oireachtas Education Committee yet present for four meetings out of 62 of the Children’s rights committee, according to Shatter.

What we need is a Commission of Inquiry, with this brief: To look into the broken and ignored relationship between the pre-eminence of State law and the confusion in State law created by the widespread respect for Canon Law. Such a commission would need a short timetable and its remit confined. It should consist of a small group group drawn from Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Nuala O’Loan comes to mind as well as Maurice Hayes. The S.D.L.P. politician, Declan O’Loan is another sensible candidate. In recent criticism of the Pope’s letter he expressed disappointment it did not address or analyse ‘what went wrong and why it went wrong’. He repudiates ‘the very unhealthy culture of centralised clerical power within the Church and the attendant secrecy. If that is not even admitted, what hope is there of correcting it thoroughly?’ He invokes the need, in the light of the Pope’s proposed ‘visitation’, to define whether or not this should be backed by State intervention.

Not many politicians in the South have come anywhere near saying this.

‘I find it embarrassing that, in many historical instances, the lead in developing human rights has come from secular society rather than from the Church. Indeed it has often been achieved against opposition by the Church. Once again in this area of responding to child abuse, despite the strongest imperative, the Church appears to be slow to move in a necessary direction.’ We need a Commission to define this in brave, forthright and unequivocal terms.

Irish Independent 27th March 2010

barnold@independent.ie

Mar

26

Sinead O’Connor: ‘There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope’

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By Henry Chu – Los Angeles Times

March 24, 2010 | 11:30 a.m.

Reporting from Bray, Ireland – She shot to fame 20 years ago with her shaved head, chiseled cheeks and haunting rendition of the song “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Then she gained notoriety when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on American TV, calling him “the enemy” and urging people to fight child abuse.

Sinead O’Connor is still singing. And she’s still speaking out against abuse — only now her 1992 stunt on “Saturday Night Live” almost seems prescient as the Roman Catholic Church faces a growing catalog of complaints about child sexual and physical assault by priests in her Irish homeland and across Europe.

Such mistreatment was rampant here in Ireland, going back decades. By 1987, the Irish church was alarmed enough that it took out an insurance policy against future lawsuits and claims for compensation stemming from sexual-abuse allegations.

This past weekend, Pope Benedict XVI issued a “pastoral letter” apologizing to the flock in Ireland for the church’s past failures. He did not outline any disciplinary action against the bishops who many here say covered up priestly misdeeds, though on Wednesday he accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee, who had been accused of failing to report suspected pedophile priests to police. The pope also pinned no blame on the Vatican itself for a culture of secrecy that critics say it deliberately fostered.

O’Connor, now 43 and a mother of four, spoke to The Times on Tuesday at her seaside home in Bray, south of Dublin, about the abuse scandal.

Do you feel the pope’s letter was enough?

It’s a study in the fine art of lying and actually betraying your own people. . . . He starts by saying that he’s writing with great concern for the people of Ireland. If he was that concerned, why has it taken him 23 years to write a letter, and why did he or the last pope never get on an airplane and come to meet the victims in any of these countries and apologize?

The letter sells the Irish [church] hierarchy downriver by stating again and again that the Irish hierarchy has somehow acted independently of the Vatican. . . . The documents are there to prove that that’s a lie. . . .

If you were the boss of a company and some of the employees of your company were known to sexually abuse children, you would fire them instantly. You would also go instantly to meet the people who had been abused and profusely apologize and offer your help in any way whatsoever to deal with this. . . . That has never happened.

As a cardinal, the pope wrote an order in 2001 demanding that abuse cases be dealt with in secret. But doesn’t the directive also mention cooperating with civil authorities?

That document stated that all matters of abuse were to be sent to him in Rome, where he would decide whether they would be dealt with by Rome or locally by the bishops. They were to be dealt with exclusively by the church, and they were subject to pontifical secret, which means you can be excommunicated if you breach the secret. . . .

[It's true that] it’s the first time ever that any document coming from the Vatican actually does say to the clergy that they should cooperate with civil authorities. . . . What I object to here is, the first time they said that was 2001. They knew back in 1987 at least that this was an issue. . . . They knew so much that they took out an insurance policy.

So what should the pope do?

There should be a full criminal investigation of the Catholic hierarchy of any country in which this has been an issue. There should be a full criminal investigation of the Vatican.

There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope. The pope should stand down for the fact that he did not act in a Christian fashion to protect children, and for the fact that his organization acted to preserve their business interests decade after decade rather than be concerned about the interests of children, and for showing so much disrespect for Christ, God, the victims, the rest of us, their own clergy. . . .

The Vatican and the pope need to get on their knees and confess the full truth in the same language they make us use in Mass. . . . They need to get on their knees, open everything up, be transparent, tell the truth, ask the people for forgiveness and prayers.

That confession is their only hope of survival into the 21st century. It’s a rickety bridge, but it is a bridge. And personally, I would be willing to bring them across that little bridge into the 21st century and help them. . . .

If they don’t do that, they will not survive. . . . I hope they do survive, because there’s a lot that’s really beautiful about Catholicism. Even though there are those of us who are fighting it like you would fight an abusive parent, you love the parent still and you want it to be healed.

What about the abuse victims?

He [the pope] says his concern is “to bring healing to the victims.” But he’s denying them the one thing which might actually bring them healing, which is a full confession from the Vatican. . . .

You’re talking about some very broken people. . . . Life is very difficult for them. They can’t hold down jobs, can’t hold down relationships. . . . Life is difficult. Therapy costs a lot of money. These people don’t make much money; hardly any of them are actually fit to work. They need the Vatican to cough up some of its billions [to] pay for these people to be able to live their lives.

Should Irish bishops resign, as a few have offered?

Resignation gets them off the hook. They should be criminally prosecuted. . . . If you or I covered up crimes like that, we’d be slap-bang in jail in five minutes, and rightly so. There’s a double standard. . . .

What should the Irish people do?

It’s the good-hearted, sweet Catholic people who go to Mass still despite all of this — they are the people who have the power in their hands to get the Vatican on its knees and confess. . . . How these people can do that is by refusing to go to Mass, boycott them until they actually come to their knees and confess. . . .

The way we are at the moment, we’re in a very dysfunctional relationship with an organization that’s actually abusing us. And we can’t see what’s being done to us. We have the mentality of a battered wife who thinks it’s her fault. If we had a friend in a similar relationship, we would beg him or her to walk away.

Yet you still consider yourself a Catholic?

I’m a Catholic, and I love God. . . . That’s why I object to what these people are doing to the religion that I was born into. . . .

I’m passionately in love and always have been with what I call the Holy Spirit, which I believe the Catholic Church have held hostage and still do hold hostage. I think God needs to be rescued from them. They are not representing Christian values and Christian attitudes. If they were truly Christian, they would’ve confessed ages ago, and we wouldn’t be having to batter the door down and try to get blood from a stone.

Mar

26

IRISH WOMEN SURVIVORS SUPPORT NETWORK IN BRITAIN

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From Cllr Sally Mulready
London Irish Centre

Dear Editor

As I sat in my home in East London watching Cardinal Brady tell the Irish nation what was in the Pope’s long awaited letter, I thought of the thousands of Irish people, hurt damaged and defiled who fled Ireland after a childhoods of unbearable and unimaginable brutality at the hands of Catholic priests, nuns and Christians brothers.

I visualised and knew they would be sitting in their homes all over Britain watching as I did, looking for every word that would be recognition of their pain, their suffering and their struggle to live ‘normal’ lives with their families, their children and in their communities. I know many of them would have wept as I was moved to do, unable to articulate whether the Pope’s letter made the hurt and the ever present painful memories seem any less so by his apology .

After a day of reflecting on the Pope’s letter , I find I cannot be satisfied. I know it has not taken away the pain and though the Pope endeavoured in that very sincere and Pontifical Way to express sorrow , remorse and even pity to the Survivors , in the end the protection and the renewal of the Catholic Church and the failure to acknowledge that crimes against children were being covered up, were the paramount messages I discerned from his letter. I am very disappointed and hurt by the inadequacies of the Pontiffs letter. The justice survivors seek cannot be obtained merely through prayer and other ecclesiastical reflections on a so called Higher Authority. Cannon law has shown itself to be corruptible and not always on the side of truth . It will not in itself bring justice.

But I am an optimistic and determined soul. And there are were some hopeful indications that the Pope had begun to understand what had happened and as a result there is a way forward and for that I say thank you to Pope Benedict.

The Popes had strong words of condemnation for his ‘ priests and religious’ who have abused children. He called on them to ‘take responsibility for their sins’ and to ‘submit to give an account of their actions’ and to submit to ‘the demands of justice’. Can we now interpret that to mean that the Pope will not let Cannon law stand in the way of bishops reporting offenders still alive today and obliging them to submit themselves to the law of the land. They have committed criminal acts that should be subject to the due process of his law.

Another hopeful sign of the Popes letter is his address to his Bishops who he accused very forthrightly of being guilty of ‘serious mistakes in responding to allegations of sexual abuse and it had …’undermined their credibility and effectiveness’. Good and decent though some of our existing Bishops are they need to go. We must have a fresh start and their prolonged stay is simply putting off the inevitable. The Pope has I feel given them a way of going with their dignity and their record of service to the Catholic church still intact. Hang on now and they will be forced to go in a matter of months in disgrace.

The Pope’s recommendation that his priests offer up ‘fasting, prayer and reading of scripture’ should be extended to making themselves available to talk and listen to Survivors accounts of their suffering.

They need to know and understand more from the perspective of Survivors what happened. Along with their reading of the Scriptures, I recommend they talk to ordinary survivors in their communities , listen to them with humility and compassion . They should also read reliable and recognised accounts of Survivors as portrayed in Mary Raftery Documentary, States of Fear and in the harrowing account written in the God Squad by Paddy Doyle. With this new knowledge and understanding we can begin to start the essential process of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Sincerely

Cllr Sally Mulready

Chair of Irish Women Survivors Support Network
Published in The Irish Post Newspaper.

Feb

21

Stephen Fry on The Catholic Church.

Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 23 Comments

The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world, a debate held by Intelligence2 on 19 Oct 2009

Debate on The Catholic Church. BBC TVStephen Fry speaks about the Catholic Church, the Pope, Abuse and other issues. Well worth listening to and watching the video.

Chair Zeinab Badawi introduces the motion ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.’

Use the chapter bar on the right-hand side of the page to view each of the panelists’ speeches.
The link to the full debate is here.

If you want to skip directly to Stephen Fry, the link is here but the full debate is worth watching if you’ve time.

Initial Vote: 678 For, 1102 Against, Undecided 346

Final Vote: 268 For, 1876 Against, Undecided 34

Feb

21

What is a Real V.I.P ?

Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 22 Comments


Sinéad O’Connor singing The Times They Are A-Changing — From the Late Late Show April 2nd 2010

What is a Real V.I.P ?

Do we have the balls to go to that party?
Or would we rather dance with vanity? Tell me now what’s a real V.I.P?

Who are we to give that name to us?
When we don’t know the lives of others.
When we can barely raise a finger.
to help our own sisters and brothers.

Wasn’t it in history.
The artists always spoke their people’s needs?
Now we’re gorged upon what devils feed
In the shallow form of M.T.V

Telling the youth to worship futile dreams.
And long for bling and for material things.
I tell you what a really real V.I.P is..
A face that never was nor will be kissed.

To whom exactly are we giving hope?
When we stand behind the velvet rope.
Getting our pictures taken with the pope
Like some sick April fool kind of joke.

Who is the real V.I.P?
The true and the most conquering king
Who looks around at everything?
And knows exactly what we’ve been.

His is the face that never was nor will be kissed.
Do we think we’ll be down on his guest list?
When we’re standing at the gate.
After being fashionably late.

There’ll be no make-up and there’ll be no film crew.
No vuitton bags and no manolo shoes.
When he’s presiding over you.
Asking you did you love only you.

Or did you stand for something else.
Besides the hankering for fame and famousness.
The one who always was and always is
Will show you what a real V.I.P is.

The fatherless.
The motherless.
The ravaged child at home
who cried to you.
You will be asked to say
what did you do.

What is behind his velvet curtain?
Don’t know but I can say for certain
The face that never was nor will be kissed
Will tell you what a real V.I.P is.

Sinead O’Connor. February 20th 2010

Feb

11

Andrew Madden: Mary Kenny says I am to be pitied? Give me strength

Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 22 Comments

By Andrew Madden

Thursday February 11 2010

IN her column in this newspaper last Saturday, Mary Kenny chose to make reference to my spiritual life. She pitied me for having no spiritual element in my life, assuming it consisted only of the material and was therefore bland and unimaginative.

Mary Kenny has, of course, never met me, never phoned me, never asked for a meeting or an interview over coffee, never tried to contact me in any way to ask me about anything. Until now I have made little or no reference in public to what spiritual life I do have, so she had absolutely no information on which to base her opinion. What she did have was the most contemptible arrogance to assume to know enough to write about it anyway. A more ignorant, condescending pouring out of sanctimonious drivel I have not read in a long time.

All Kenny knew was that I had completed the formal process of defecting from the Catholic Church, and from that one single fact she assumed to know everything else. Next week she’ll probably preach to us all she knows about humility. Thousands of others have chosen to leave the Catholic Church too but, unlike Kenny, I don’t assume to know all of their reasons.

I have been a Catholic in name only for many years, but after all I have seen of the church in recent times, I decided I did not want that organisation in my life anymore, not even in name only. To assume, as Kenny does, that I therefore have no spirituality in my life is truly reprehensible. I am crossing a line here I haven’t crossed before, but Kenny’s nonsense last Saturday cannot go unchecked. Almost 13 years ago I tried to stop drinking, having tried twice before and failed. I had been an active alcoholic for 14 years by then and was quite a mess at the end of it all. Anything I did, in all those years I was drinking, was done with a drink in my hand. I lived at about 10pc of what I was capable of and I struggled to do even that.

When I stopped drinking I had to learn how to live without it. I had to learn how to be. How to get through a whole day without getting drunk. How to pass an evening. How to enjoy music. How to conduct friendships properly. How to relax at the end of a day’s work. How to socialise and meet people sober.

I also learned that I could not do all of this by myself. I had friends who themselves had crossed the bridge from addiction to normal living, but more was needed. Over time, as I slowly became happy and confident, I accepted that I was receiving more help than that of friends. I came to believe in a power greater than myself and came to believe that that power was helping me stay sober and helping me learn to live happily. I chose to call that power the “Spirit of Recovery”. It didn’t come easy or natural for me to start believing in any such power, but as time in recovery passed, my belief in a power greater than myself grew. Instead of believing that a higher power was just helping me stay sober, I believed that it was helping me in all areas of my life. As a friend of mine says: “He’s looking after all of it, or none of it.” I see my higher power as a loving, caring essence in my life that wants me to live a good life.

Today I try to hand my will and my life over to the care of that higher power every morning before I leave the house in order that my actions and thoughts might be guided by my higher power’s will for me. At night I review my day and thank my higher power for everything, including the fact that I didn’t drink. I ask my higher power to look after other people too, just like I used to ask God to do when I was a little boy lying in bed thinking I would one day be a priest.

But of course, I don’t need to be a priest to believe in a power greater than myself, spirituality is not the preserve of practising Catholics. And having a sense of oneself that extends beyond the physical and the material is not an understanding exclusive to the obnoxious Mary Kenny.

And the next time she chooses to write about other people she should afford them the courtesy of getting her facts right first, and keep her patronising pity to herself.

Andrew Madden’s best-selling book ‘Altar Boy’ helped expose abuse in the Catholic Church

- Andrew Madden

Irish Independent

Dec

31

Magdalene girl: ‘I cried for weeks and weeks. I was nobody. I was 16’

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Thursday, December 31, 2009 – Irish Examiner.

CLAIMING that the new “information wasn’t available” when he rejected a distinct redress scheme for Magdalene survivors, Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe’s response rings hollow (Irish Examiner, December 17). It is important, moreover, to emphasise that evidence of state complicity rests not only with the materials laid before the Department of Justice on December 14.

Indeed, the Department of Education must also acknowledge its own complicity in this matter.

Had officials from the department attended the scheduled meeting with Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), I would have pointed to the department’s awareness of children being placed in Magdalene laundries as late as 1970 (beyond those transferred from state residential institutions).

This awareness never led to direct corrective action or intervention. Indeed it is still unacknowledged. As such, it calls into question the department’s commitment to “cherish all of the children of the nation equally”.

The Reformatory and Industrial School Systems Report 1970 (ie, the Kennedy Report), commissioned by the Department of Education, documents two distinct populations of children so confined. In a discussion of children placed in “religious convents” by “parents, relatives, social workers, welfare officers, clergy or garda”, the report states that “the committee is satisfied that there are at least 70 girls between the ages of 13 and 19 confined in this way who should properly be dealt with under the reformatory schools’ system”.

Likewise, in a table attempting to capture the “total number of children in care”, the report asserts that there were 617 children resident in “voluntary homes which have not applied for approval”. As the department can affirm, these “voluntary homes” were typically Magdalene laundries and other “religious convents”.

The report’s two figures – 70 and 617 – offer a snapshot for the scale of the problem in 1968/’69. My questions to the officials from the Department of Education, again if they had attended, would have been the following:

1. Given the department’s awareness, and the moral and constitutional obligations to protect children and provide a basic minimum education, can the minister now account for each of these children?

2. Given its awareness that children were being “cared” for in these institutions, did the department ever visit, inspect or license these “religious homes”?

I ask these two questions in light of the Ryan report offering a window into what life was like for children transferred to the laundries from a residential institution.

We are told the regime was “like a prison”, that doors were locked all the time … working conditions were harsh, “constantly washing laundry in cold water and using heavy irons for many hours”. One survivor remembers her child labour: “I did collars; you had to keep ironing them until they became real stiff. There was a little wooden thing you could stand on.”

Read more

Oct

26

Monument to victims of abuse is an insult

Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 17 Comments

Letters to the Editor, Irish Independent. Friday 23rd October 2009

The proposed €500,000 “memorial to victims of child abuse” (Aine Kerr, Letters, October 19) bearing the words of Mr Bertie Ahern’s 1999 “apology” to Ireland’s former child prisoners is an expensive and offensive political gesture.

The planned structure is not a memorial to the victims; it is a monument to Mr Ahern, a former Taoiseach whose utterances few take seriously now.

Readers may remember that in 1999 Mr Ahern (then Taoiseach) issued the following statement, which is now to appear on the memorial:

“On behalf of the State and all the citizens of the State, the Government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue”.

That statement is not an apology but a denial and a deception. It is simply not true to say that the State failed to detect the pain being suffered by the child prisoners. Time and again that pain was reported to the State and the politicians each time dismissed the reports and tried to discredit the messenger.

Even Fr Flanagan, an Irish American priest who in 1946, drew attention to the ill-treatment of the child prisoners was dismissed as a liar by the Minister for Education, Sean Moylan in the Dail.

Besides, the State’s reformatory rules, which were published for all to read, authorised the infliction of pain upon the inmates.

Naked flogging of the child prisoners was approved and condoned by successive Ministers for Education and their inspectors into the 1990s.

Only in Ahern logic can you authorise violence and then deny all knowledge of it.

A memorial bearing Mr Ahern’s fake apology will be a permanent reminder of Ireland’s denial and a standing offence to its former child prisoners.

The Ryan Report on Ireland’s child prisons (May, 2009) recommended the construction of the memorial and claimed, with Ahern-type logic, that the structure would somehow “alleviate … the effects of abuse on those who suffered”!

But Justice Sean Ryan failed to explain how Bertie’s denial carved in stone would work its magic on the former child prisoners.

I escaped from Artane prison and from Ireland in 1963. I am one of many thousands of child prison refugees. Ireland denies me the simple justice I request, namely, the recision of the illegal detention order that put me in Artane.

Consequently, I shall renounce Irish nationality and never set foot in Ireland again. I will therefore, thankfully, never experience the memorial’s miraculous healing powers.

The memorial is a political stunt. It has nothing whatever to do with alleviating the suffering of the victims. It has to do with salving the collective conscience of a nation racked by unacknowledged guilt for the mass-persecution of its children in the post-independence era. It is a monumental insult to Ireland’s former child prisoners.

JIM BERESFORD
FORMER ARTANE CHILD PRISONER 14262
SALENDINE NOOK, HUDDERSFIELD

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