Yet another squint at Vatican priorities
Alan Cowell in the New York Times spots a connection between the Bishop of Bruges and Roman Polanski. They both fiddled with children and they have both escaped the long arm of the law.
That question seemed likely to be asked more searchingly this week after the Vatican issued new rules about the handling of priestly abuse, listing pedophilia in a catalog of other supposed grave crimes including “the attempted ordination of women.”
“What I did, supporting the ordination of women, they saw as a serious crime,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, an American priest excommunicated less than two months after he participated in a ceremony ordaining women. “But priests who were abusing children, they did not see as a crime. What does that say?”
That they really really really think women are Not Good Enough. Other things too, but that’s a biggy.
“The many artists and intellectuals who haughtily dismissed what Polanski had done on the basis of his talent and achievement” were thinking of his films, Richard Cohen wrote for The Washington Post. “They should have thought of their own daughters.”
Well maybe they too really really think women are Not Good Enough. Maybe they think that partly because of the relentless pressure of the “great” monotheisms. Maybe they just do think that a male artist matters more than a female age 13. They probably don’t realize they think that, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think it, in a buried kind of way.
Thanks for an exceptional website. On the NYTimes story in particular, I cannot resist pointing out that the author risks sounding blithely ignorant of thousands of years of human history in his opening. And I quote: “… a starting point to ruminate on … whether celebrity, art, money or power might offer exemption from ordinary justice. ” Really? Such things can influence justice? And finally a “starting point” for considering the fact. At last.
Thank you.
Heh. True. That could be just the journalistic thing, I suppose – not assuming that the reader knows anything at all.
And yet there are still so many Catholic women. Why is this? I have some ideas, but they would undoubtedly be considered too churlish and noisy to air.
I also noted in the New Vatican Playbook that they are arranging a new agency to combat secularism. Seems that quite a few Catholics have been defecting in the past few years, coinciding with the pedophilia scandal, particularly in Europe. It’s quite interesting that the Church’s strategy for retaining and recapturing its members has seems to have much less to do with ameliorating and/or making amends for their horrifying practices (re: pedophiles, on condoms v. HIV, etc.) than with making people fear the EVILS of secularism. Blimey.
Ho yus the EVILS of secularism like treating women as equals and not barring women from any say in the rules that govern them and actually prosecuting priestly child rape as a crime. Oh the horror, take it away!
http://thepapalvisit.org.uk/Pope-Benedict-XVI/Becoming-a-Pope
It all begins and ends here. Just look at all the big strapping men in the attached link. Undoubtedly, you’ll see that one of the “great” monotheism’s is so terribly alive and kicking very well, thank you very much. Women priests and survivors of institutional and clerical sex abuse, have had and still continue to have a grave job trying to metaphorically and verbally break down the gigantic Vatican Conclave wall. In order to point out to the fancy frocked men in red with antediluvian misogynistic mind-sets, the atrocities of sexism, sex abuse of children and inter-generational institutional child abuse, at the hands of their brothers and sisters in Christ.
Nevertheless, some of our boo boo vuvuzela shouting from global rooftops for nigh on two decades and more for some survivors like survivors Christine Buckley, Mick Waters, Bernadettte Fahy, Colm O” Gorman, Andrew Madden, Paddy Doyle and also the longstanding constant help of OB and passionate people of her ilk who frequent B&W, we have had our restless and weary voices heard. The torches have continually been flashed in the direction of the most powerful church in the whole world. Our mad deafening dins have mostly paid off.
Those who think they have to protect the Catholic church from folk like us should be left under no illusion. The male church is quite capable of protecting itself. The photo should speak for itself http://thepapalvisit.org.uk/
Likening us to characters from Salem, on a witch-hunt, to bring down the church and calling us eeeeeeeeeeeeevil and every other name under the sun, did not deter us in our pursuit to fight for the truth. We fought the good fight and without the help of intellectuals mostly, I’m sad to say. Ironically, the wrongdoers of children from industrial schools were from the educated classes. It beats me, just thinking about it. The silent ones in the institutions were also of the same classes. So strange! If it was not for the education of one child, the story of institutional child abuse from Goldenbridge and all the others that flowed from that as well as clerical abuse we would have been lost to Irish history. There would have been no Laffoy/Ryan Report and Murphy Report and whatever else comes to like from Gods nine appointed prelates to Ireland in the Autumn of this year.
That they really really really think children from industrial schools and women priests are Not Good Enough. Other things too, but that’s a biggy.
Yeah, touche! Spot the other connections, as the perpetrators of the heinous crimes on children also got away with red and black murder.
Comparatively speaking they both do share the same deviant behaviour of sexually abusing children. Though, there is one contrast, in that Vangheluwe chose the male species, while Polanski nicely settled for the female sex. They also got away Scott free. well almost in the case of the director, who only served a short time in a psychiatric hospital in America.
I read about the sordid details of both abusers. Seemingly Polanski got off on a technicality with Swiss authorities. The papers were apparently not in order. So it was left with no other option than not to extradite him to America.
What a dream place for RP to be under house arrest! Gstaad! I was there a very long time ago, and it is an exceedingly glorious part of Switzerland to reside. It is a winter skiing play-ground for the uber-rich. Liz Taylor has an abode there. I would hazard a guess that the defunct had to settle for the Vatican to hide away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7106284.ece
The editor of Vanity Fair, responded, “I find it amazing that a man who lives in France can sue a magazine that is published in America in a British courtroom”.