Author: Ophelia Benson

Wait; what? Michael Ruse in the CHE:

There are days when, I swear to God, I am all set to enroll under the banner of Richard Dawkins and anathematize all religions and those who subscribe to them.  I take a lot of criticism from my fellow atheists, including my fellow Brainstormers, for arguing that science and religion are compatible.  I still think that, but increasingly I cannot for the life of me see why any decent human being would want to be religious, and increasingly I think one should be ashamed to be religious.

Increasingly? Increasingly?

What on earth took him so long? What’s different now? Why has he been yelling at us all this time just for being aware of what he is only just catching up to?

I asked him that; it will be interesting to see if he replies. I think he did reply to something I said on one of the Berlinerblau threads, but I’m not sure.

It’s really very odd though. What does he talk about as examples of this “increasingly”? The Cloyne report and the Toronto school that lets girls from Muslim backgrounds be shamed for menstruating at “prayers.” Well quite, but we’ve been talking about this kind of thing for years, while Ruse has been shouting at us for years, so what is different now? And, to repeat, what took him so long?

That’s all this piece says to me – wo, Michael Ruse finally notices the obvious. Yes, Professor Ruse; exactly; no kidding.

Music, I tell you.

Ireland’s government demanded answers from the Vatican’s ambassador Thursday…

Gilmore and Prime Minister Enda Kenny accused the Vatican of violating Ireland’s sovereignty by instructing bishops in the letter that they should place the church’s laws above the nation’s…

“There’s one law in this country. Everybody is going to have to learn to comply with it. The Vatican will have to comply with the laws of this country,” Gilmore said after his face-to-face grilling of the ambassador, a rare experience for the pope’s diplomats anywhere, let alone long-deferential Ireland.

Exactly why it’s music. It’s about fucking time. The pervasive deference to the Vatican – by no means just in Ireland – is ridiculous and appalling.

Kenny, who didn’t attend the meeting with the Vatican diplomat, said his
government soon would make it a crime to withhold evidence of child abuse from the police. He specified this would include any information a priest received during the sacrament of confession.

“The law of the land should not be stopped by a crozier or a collar,” Kenny
said.

Yessssssssss.

Kenny called the Vatican’s written intervention — first revealed in full by The Associated Press six months ago — “absolutely disgraceful.”

Irish leaders had sought formal Vatican approval. Instead the Vatican’s then-ambassador, the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, warned Irish bishops that a powerful church body, the Congregation for the Clergy, had ruled that such mandatory reporting of abuse claims to civil authorities conflicted with canon law.

Storero wrote that the Irish policy had the status of “merely a study document,” while the new Irish policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”

He wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.” Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome.

In other words the Vatican “ambassador” to Ireland ordered Irish clerics to disobey Irish law.

A former altar boy, Andrew Madden, was first to go public with his lawsuit against the Dublin Archdiocese, which had tried to settle the claim in quiet.

Madden offered one possible solution Thursday to the church’s difficulty in choosing between Ireland’s laws and its own, which still do not make explicit the need to report suspected child-abuse crimes to police.

“If the bishops want to live by canon law,” he said, “they should take themselves off to the Vatican and live there.”

Music.

The Irish state getting properly angry at last.

Ireland’s foreign minister summoned the country’s papal nuncio and demanded that the Vatican give a formal response to the Cloyne Report into the mishandling of clerical abuse.

That’s the stuff. Summoned; demanded.

The Cloyne Report said the Vatican, through its opposition to the Irish bishops’ 1996 guidelines for handling child sexual abuse, gave comfort to dissenters within the church who did not want to implement the procedures. In a letter to the bishops, the Congregation for Clergy described the rules as “merely a study document” and refused to give the document formal recognition.

Gilmore said the Vatican intervention was “absolutely unacceptable” and “inappropriate.” He said he had told Archbishop Leanza that an explanation and response were required as to why the Vatican had told priests and bishops they could undermine the rules.

That’s the ticket. Absolutely unacceptable; explanation required.

Responding to journalists’ queries, Gilmore said: “I want to know why this
state, with which we have diplomatic relations, issued a communication, the
effect of which was that very serious matter of the abuse of children in this
country was not reported to the authorities.”

Damn right! Finally.

It sounds as if the people who run Ireland are finally pissed off at the church.

Tough new laws to force the disclosure of information on child sexual abuse are to be introduced in response to another damning report on the failure of the Catholic Church to protect child abuse victims.

The withholding of information about serious offences against a child will be made a criminal offence, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter announced yesterday following the publication of the report on the handling of sex abuse claims in the diocese of Cloyne.

Which makes the necessary point that what the church has been doing all this time is a crime.

The report found that the Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, misled the minister for children by claiming the church’s guidelines for handling abuse cases were being fully complied with. It also found he falsely told the Health Service Executive (HSE) that allegations of abuse were being reported to gardaí.

In other words, he lied. The bishop lied. He lied to government bodies. He did it to protect his friends and colleagues at the expense of victims, who were children. He lied when he said he and his friends were in compliance. The bishop lied. His subordinates were raping children, and the bishop lied about it.

In fact, two-thirds of complaints made between 1996 and 2008 were not reported to the Garda and no complaint was passed to the HSE during this period.

The report accuses the Vatican, through its opposition to the Irish bishops’ procedures for handling child sexual abuse, of giving comfort to dissenters within the church who did not want to implement them. In a secret letter to the bishops, Rome describes the 1996 rules as “merely a study document” and not official.

They did what they wanted to do, which was good for them, at the expense of children who were victims of their organization – their Thing.

As Ms Fitzgerald pointed out: “This is not a catalogue of failure from a different era. This is not about an Ireland of 50 years ago. This is about Ireland now.”

…

“It is truly scandalous that people who presented a public face of concern continued to maintain a private agenda of concealment and evasion,” Mr Shatter commented.

The bishop “apologized” all over again.

Bishop Magee repeated earlier apologies for his failure to ensure abuse victims were fully supported and responded to. While insisting he was fully supportive of the 1996 church guidelines on abuse cases, he admitted he should have taken a much firmer role in ensuring their implementation.

“I am sorry that this happened and I unreservedly apologise to all those who suffered additional hurt because of the flawed implementation of the church procedures, for which I take full responsibility,” he said in a statement.

Oh, bullshit. That’s just words. Words are easy.

I first learned about Valley Park Middle School via Tarek Fatah at Facebook. Tarek Fatah is a great fella. He posted pictures of himself at the Gay Pride march the other day – in his wheelchair, beaming, in front of a decorative crowd of marchers.

So what is a Toronto public school doing providing a prayer service in the cafeteria? Where

girls are placed in the back, behind the boys, separated by benches used as shields.

And menstruating girls are segregated, off in their own little group, like this paragraph.

Sitting all the way at the back, yards from the other girls and more yards from the all-conquering boys. Separated out because they’re so dirty and filthy. Ewwwwww endometrium. Ewwwwwwwwww it might come off on me. Ewwwwwwwwww pollution.

Robyn Urback asks a salient question.

How is it that the TDSB can call for instruction on sexism and gender inequality in its Social Studies classes, yet look the other way when girls are facing active discrimination within its walls?

Allow me to answer that question: it can’t.