Tag: The Catholic church

  • Frank says they’re sorry but…

    I wrote my column for The Freethinker yesterday. I wrote it about the pope’s visit to Ireland. The whole subject makes me rather cross.

    The sentimental view of religion is that it makes people good, meaning kind and generous and compassionate. If that were true, surely there wouldn’t have been such an enormous gulf between how the Sisters of Mercy (oh the irony of that name) saw their administration at Goldenbridge and how the survivors saw it. Surely, surely, a religion talented at making ordinary people peculiarly kind and loving would not come up with physical and verbal abuse of captive children seized from impoverished mothers as an example of its holy work.

    Also, religion is supposed to be timeless and absolute; it’s supposed to create the standards and values, not dumbly follow those that already exist. Yet how did the “Sisters of Mercy” explain the rampant sadism at Goldenbridge?

    You’ll never guess.

  • Lax in enforcing church doctrine

    Speaking of eccentric Catholic priests like Father Greg Boyle who care more about their oppressed and overwhelmed parishioners than they do about Vatican dogma, I’m reminded that Seattle had an archbishop like that thirty years ago…and that the Vatican sent an enforcer to suppress him.

    Ever since the Vatican crackdown on Seattle Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen last summer [i.e. 1986], Patrick Jankanish has been coming alone to Sunday mass at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church.

    “My wife was a convert {to Catholicism} before we were married nine years ago,” Jankanish told a visitor, adding that the couple has been deeply involved in the vigorous social justice program of the Jesuit parish on fashionable Capital Hill.

    To the Jankanishes, Hunthausen is “very important in the justice community,” encouraging Christians to apply their faith to problems ranging from battered wives to nuclear warfare.

    So when Rome charged that Hunthausen was lax in enforcing church doctrine and stripped him of significant powers last year, Jankanish’s wife Lisa “left the church,” he said.

    Emphasis added. That’s a major reason I loathe and detest the Catholic church – that preference for evil reactionary “doctrine” over embracing actual people and their problems.

    In disciplining Hunthausen, Pope John Paul II has made clear the depth of his determination to enforce strict doctrinal orthodoxy on the church in this country. The church in the United States has long been viewed by many at the Vatican, and by some home-grown critics as well, as too lax on moral questions, too accommodating to the permissive culture that surrounds it.

    Too “lax, accommodating, permissive” on moral questions – that’s one way of looking at it, and another is that the church is far too narrow and authoritarian and reactionary on moral questions. In other words it’s not that we’re all lazy and sloppy about moral questions, it’s that the church is fucked up on moral questions. Its morality is bad and evil. The morality of people like Boyle and Hunthausen is better than the church’s. Not looser, not more relaxed, not easier – better.

    Until last summer, Hunthausen, 65, was best known for his social activism and his aggressive antiwar stance. An implacable foe of nuclear arms — he once called the Trident nuclear submarine base here “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” — he has led several antinuclear demonstrations and for the last few years he has engaged in a legal minuet with the Internal Revenue Service in which the government garnishees from the archdiocese the portion of his income tax he withholds in protest against nuclear weapons.

    The Vatican says its action against Hunthausen was prompted not by his pacifist views but by his failure to enforce church doctrine forcefully.

    He was lax, Rome said, pointing to such things as his failure to ensure that 6- and 7-year-olds made their first confession before first communion; his allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments; his not cracking down on Catholic hospitals that performed contraceptive sterilizations, and his permitting an organization of homosexual Catholics to celebrate mass in St. James Cathedral.

    There you go – that’s not “lax,” it’s better. “Confession” to a priest is not the sort of thing that should be required of anyone at any time; divorced people should not be socially shunned; hospitals should perform contraceptive sterilizations if people request them; “homosexual” Catholics should not be socially shunned. The church’s morality is ugly and cruel.

    So last year Rome installed a hand-picked auxiliary, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl, 46, and ordered Hunthausen to relinquish authority to him in five key areas, including education of priests, the liturgy, and church relations with health care institutions.

    That last one is especially sinister. “Church relations with health care institutions”=the church’s interference with women’s reproductive healthcare and everyone’s access to contraception. The church should have nothing to do with any of that.

    H/t Charles Sullivan

  • The quality of mercy

    Say you have a thieving banker or a fraudulent investment wizard. Should they be punished or should they be treated with mercy?

    There are arguments either way, but I think few would argue that they should go right on being bankers or investment wizards. Having to find another line of work seems quite compatible with mercy.

    But Pope Frankie doesn’t see it that way.

    Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope’s own advisers question.

    One case has come back to haunt him: An Italian priest who received the pope’s clemency was later convicted by an Italian criminal court for his sex crimes against children as young as 12. The Rev. Mauro Inzoli is now facing a second church trial after new evidence emerged against him, The Associated Press has learned.

    The Inzoli case is one of several in which Francis overruled the advice of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reduced a sentence that called for the priest to be defrocked, two canon lawyers and a church official told AP. Instead, the priests were sentenced to penalties including a lifetime of penance and prayer and removal from public ministry.

    And they remained priests, so the Catholic church goes on sheltering priests who have sexually abused children. Defrocking surely is not only punishment; surely it’s also a matter of the church firmly rejecting sexual abuse of children, and withdrawing any kind of tacit endorsement of it via keeping perps in its ranks.

    Many canon lawyers and church authorities argue that defrocking pedophiles can put society at greater risk because the church no longer exerts any control over them. They argue that keeping the men in restricted ministry, away from children, at least enables superiors to exert some degree of supervision.

    But Collins said the church must also take into account the message that reduced canonical sentences sends to both survivors and abusers.

    “While mercy is important, justice for all parties is equally important,” Collins said in an email. “If there is seen to be any weakness about proper penalties, then it might well send the wrong message to those who would abuse.”

    Especially given the church’s long and squalid history of protecting priests who sexually abused children, not to mention the loathsome record on Irish industrial schools and Magdalene laundries.

  • No gurlz

    So the pope got chatty on the plane back from Sweden, where he’d gone to celebrate the anniversary of the Reformation, so have a good laugh about that before we proceed.

    A journalist for the Catholic News Agency was there to catch the pearls of wisdom as he dropped them. The hot news flash is that he said the church isn’t budging its shiny little ass on the question of women priests. That’s still a big No and always will be, the affable theocrat said.

    During a press conference Tuesday aboard the papal plane from Sweden to Rome, Pope Francis said the issue of women priests has been clearly decided, while also clarifying the essential role of women in the Catholic Church.

    Oh yes rush to get that in there, lest we think he doesn’t like us. Of course he likes us! We’re so soft and sweet and cuddly and kind of soothing after a hard day chasing choir boys. He likes us, he just thinks we’re second rate. You understand.

    After stating that the issue of female ordination is closed, the Pope added that women are very important to the Church, specifically from a “Marian dimension.”

    Of course. A “Marian dimension,” meaning a soft and cuddly and vastly less important dimension. Meaning having nothing whatever to do with any kind of power or making any rules, such as for instance that women can’t be priests. Only men are fit to make rules saying that only men can be priests. It’s very lucky that it works out that way, isn’t it.

    “In Catholic ecclesiology there are two dimensions to think about,” he said. “The Petrine dimension, which is from the Apostle Peter, and the Apostolic College, which is the pastoral activity of the bishops, as well as the Marian dimension, which is the feminine dimension of the Church.”

    Pointing out that the Holy Mother Church “is a woman,” Francis said that the “spousal mystery” of the Church as the spouse of Christ can help us to understand these two dimensions.

    Oh go choke on a biscuit, Frank.

  • Clout

    Ah the priorities of the Catholic church. When it’s about compensation for victims of child-raping priests? Then it’s bankruptcy, or transfer of funds to the protected Cemetery Account, or a quick trip to Vatican City. But when it’s legalization of marijuana? Money is no object!

    The Boston Archdiocese is pouring $850,000 into a last-minute effort to defeat a state ballot measure to legalize marijuana, calling increased drug use a threat to the Catholic Church’s health and social-service programs.

    …

    “It reflects the fact that the archdiocese holds the matter among its highest priorities,” archdiocese spokesman Terrence Donilon said of the donation. “It’s a recognition that, if passed, the law would have significantly detrimental impacts on our parishes, our ministries.”

    …

    In 2012, the church helped lead the fight against a ballot measure that would have allowed doctor-assisted suicides. The Boston Archdiocese and its affiliated entities contributed about $2.5 million, and the proposal failed.

    So they perhaps helped ensure that people in pain cannot choose to exit life in Massachusetts. They perhaps helped ensure that people afraid of dying in pain cannot have the reassurance that the choice is available in Massachusetts. People for whom marijuana is medically helpful in controlling pain or nausea or both – they can take a hike too. Nice job, archdiocese.

     

  • A clampdown on increasingly varied uses for ashes

    Ah, the Vatican, and god-botherers in general, inventing ridiculous intrusive rules based on their reality-defying beliefs, and then trying to insist that everyone obey them. Like the Vatican saying omg no you may not scatter someone’s ashes or fling them off the top of a building or put them on your bookshelf next to Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell. Why mayn’t I? Well because it gets death all wrong. The Vatican is the authority on death, as any fule kno. Death isn’t where you stop being alive and begin to decompose, it’s the gateway to eternal life dootdeedoo.

    Strict new Vatican guidelines forbid a list of increasingly popular means of commemorating loved ones – from scattering ashes at sea to having them turned into jewellery or put in a locket – dismissing them as New Age practices and “pantheism”.

    A formal instruction, approved by Pope Francis, even forbids Catholics [to keep] ashes in an urn at home, other than in “grave and exceptional cases”.

    As if it’s any of their damn business. If people find it comforting to keep ashes at home, who is the Vatican to tell them not to? Mean bastards with stupid wrong ideas, that’s who.

    The document issued by the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) claims many modern cremation practices increasingly reflect non-Christian ideas about “fusion with Mother Nature”.

    In other words they’re a little closer to reality than Christian ideas are. There is no Mother Nature, but our bodies are material and part of nature, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is just talking the usual old nonsense.

    For centuries the Catholic Church forbade cremation altogether, primarily because of the teaching that Christians will be raised from the grave ahead of the Day of Judgment.

    The ban was finally lifted in 1963 in a landmark Vatican document which accepted that there were often pressing social and sanitary needs for cremation but urged Catholics to choose burial wherever possible.

    That’s the ticket: split the difference! Baby Jesus can still raise a few cremated people, but if there are too many of them, Baby Jesus will simply not be able to get to them all before it’s time to feed the dog, so choose burial whenever possible. That all makes sense and hangs together.

    The new guidance accepts cremation in principle but signals a clampdown on increasingly varied uses for ashes, insisting instead that they should only be kept in a “sacred place”, such as a cemetery.

    “[The Church] cannot … condone attitudes or permit rites that involve erroneous ideas about death, such as considering death as the definitive annihilation of the person, or the moment of fusion with Mother Nature or the universe, or as a stage in the cycle of regeneration, or as the definitive liberation from the ‘prison’ of the body,” it argues.

    Oh yes, it’s “erroneous” to consider death as the termination of the person, while it’s 100% accurate to consider death a ticket to Daddy God’s best parlor.

    It goes on: “In order that every appearance of pantheism, naturalism or nihilism be avoided, it is not permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way, nor may they be preserved in mementos, pieces of jewellery or other objects.”

    It then adds that if someone has asked for their ashes to be scattered “for reasons contrary to the Christian faith” then “a Christian funeral must be denied to that person”.

    Mean bastards they are.

  • An individual Bishop in his diocese

    About Sister Carol Keehan again, the President and CEO of the Catholic Health Association who put out an evasive (to put it politely) statement on the ACLU / MergerWatch report on the mess of Catholic hospitals. I did a follow-up post about her pointing out she’s not all bad, because she supported the health care bill despite opposition from the bishops. But a reader reminded us I’d been harsh about her before, which prompted me to look it up, and here’s the press release dated January 31, 2011:

    WASHINGTON (January 31, 2011)—In response to questions raised about the authority of the local bishop in the interpretation and implementation of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs), conversations have taken place among Sister Carol Keehan, DC, president of the Catholic Health Association (CHA); Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Florida, who is a member of the CHA Board of Directors. Bishop Kevin Vann of Fort Worth, episcopal liaison to the CHA, was also part of the consultation. Following those conversations, Sister Keehan and Archbishop Dolan exchanged letters to underscore the agreement evident in their conversations.

    In her January 18 letter, Sister Keehan affirmed to Archbishop Dolan CHA’s acknowledgement of the role of the local bishop as the authoritative interpreter of the ERDs in such Catholic facilities. In a January 26 response, Archbishop Dolan thanked Sister Keehan for making clear that CHA and the bishops share this understanding of the Church’s teaching.

    In other words she affirmed the right of Catholic bishops to meddle in health care. She did so in the context of the bishop of Phoenix’s effort to get a hospital and the network of hospitals it belonged to to agree in writing never again to perform an abortion like the one performed at St Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix to save the life of a pregnant woman. So, in short, she affirmed the right of bishops to tell hospitals not to save the lives of women.

    Here’s her letter to the horrible Timothy Dolan:

    Dear Archbishop Dolan:

    Thank you again for taking the time to talk with Bishop Lynch and me about CHA’s position regarding the ethical and religious directives. I was pleased to hear of your appreciation of the role of Catholic hospitals in providing the healing ministry of Jesus to our country.

    I was happy to have the opportunity to assure you that publicly and privately, CHA has always said to sponsors, governing board members, manager and clinicians that an individual Bishop in his diocese is the authoritative interpreter of the ERDs. We explain that a Bishop has a right to interpret the ERDs and also to develop his own ethical and religious directives if he chooses.

    CHA has a sincere desire to work with the Church and individual Bishops to understand as clearly as possible, clinical issues and bring the majesty of the Church’s teaching to that. We are absolutely convinced that the teaching of the Church, in combination with a clear understanding of the clinical situation serves the people of God very well. CHA has consistently worked to help its members and others have a general understanding of the ethical and religious directives, while at the same time, noting that the local bishop is the authoritative interpreter in that diocese of the directives.

    Thank you for your efforts and your support of Catholic healthcare.

    Sincerely,
    Sister Carol Keehan, DC
    President and Chief Executive Officer

    Lots of nice pious words, in which to agree among themselves that a pregnant woman who goes to one of their hospitals and needs an abortion because her pregnancy is killing her is shit out of luck.

    The woman in Phoenix, never forget, had three small children.

  • Fraternity rules

    The priest Mafia strikes again.

    A priest, originally from County Tyrone and now based in the United States, claims he has been “frozen out” of the Catholic Church after calling the police to investigate a fellow clergyman who had shown child-porn images to 14-year-old parishioner.

    Fr John A Gallagher (48), from Strabane, Co Tyrone, is now living in a holiday home belonging to one of his friends and parishioners. He says the locks on his parochial house were changed and he was placed on medical leave by his bishop in the Diocese of Palm Beach, FL. Gallagher says he was told by the Catholic Church to put a pedophile priest on a plane back to India rather than cooperate with the police.

    Because priests are above the law, don’t you know, and the church has a special dispensation (granted by itself) to deal with little things like sexual abuse of children itself in house, without any unpleasant intervention by law enforcement.

    The incident took place in January 2015. Gallagher, who has remained silent on the matter until now, has written to bishops and cardinals in Ireland and America as well as the Vatican but has been unable to locate the Indian clergyman in question. He said he has not received a satisfactory response from the Catholic Church.

    The Belfast Telegraph reports that Fr Jose Palimattom, who had been at the parish of the Holy Name of Jesus Christ in West Palm Beach for just one month, approached a 14-year-old boy after Mass. The priest showed the boy as many as 40 images of naked boys. According to ABC news, the tag words in the images included “little boys,” and “young boys 10-18 yoa.”

    …

    Police say he was in the first stages of grooming the boy.

    The night after Palimattom had shown the young boy the photos he sent him a Facebook message which read “Good night. Sweet dreams.”

    The young boy told a friend who reported this to the Church choirmaster, who immediately informed Fr Gallagher.

    The Irish priest says that on the night he found out he was told by a Florida Church official, “We need to make him go away, put on a plane.”

    The same official also told him not to keep any notes.

    Rather than following the Church’s instruction to “make him go away,” Gallagher interviewed Fr Palimattom along with one of his parishioners, a retired police officer. The parishioner took notes at the meeting.

    Palimattom admitted to showing nude pictures of boys to the teen. He also admitted that he had sexually assaulted boys in India before arriving in the US. A few hours later he repeated this confession to detectives from the specialist unit of the West Palm Beach Police.

    Gallagher contacted the police, following the rules the Catholic Church had set down after hundreds of cases of sexual abuse carried out by the clergy on children.

    So that church punished him. The church cares about itself; everyone else can go to hell.

  • An ambitious and capable young priest

    David Marr at the Guardian Australia suggests that George Pell kept shtum about those child-rapey priests because if he hadn’t he would have remained an obscure priest instead of wafting to the glorious elevation of cardinal.

    Had young Pell made it his business to find why the paedophile Father Gerald Ridsdale was being shifted from parish to parish in the 1970s – in later years by a committee on which he himself sat – he might well be living the twilight years of his career not in Rome but the seaside parish of Warrnambool.

    From Pell’s evidence on the second day of his Roman cross-examination there emerged a picture of an ambitious and capable young priest who decided, early on, to steer clear of this dangerous issue.

    On Monday Pell admitted knowing bits and pieces about some of the offenders and some of their crimes in Ballarat. He earned credibility for that. But on Tuesday he swore blind he knew nothing about the worst of them all: Ridsdale.

    His bishop never told him.

    But the devastating admission drawn from Pell by Gail Furness SC, counsel assisting the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, was that he never bothered to ask.

    “It was a sad story and of not much interest to me,” he told the commission. By the late 1970s he was a busy priest running the Catholic Institute of Education. “I had no reason to turn my mind to the evils Ridsdale had perpetrated.”

    Except that he still sat on the committee moving Ridsdale around Ballarat, leaving – as he admits now – fresh victims behind every time and finding new ones in every new parish.

    Pell never asked anyone, it seems, why this priest was shifted every couple of years, from Apollo Bay to Inglewood to Edenhope to Bungaree to Kangaroo Flat to Mortlake and, finally, to a desk job in Sydney.

    Hey maybe the guy just liked a bit of variety.

    Was I alone in wishing Furness would ask: should they call the cops? Pell answered the question unasked. “I’m not sure at that stage there was even a civic responsibility to report such a crime.”

    The cardinal was speaking from the heart. By the look of things he has failed to convince the royal commission that he did his duty by the children of Ballarat. But he has surely convinced them of his loyalty to the hierarchical church.

    “A priest has a moral responsibility to do what is appropriate to his position,” he declared in the last minutes of his evidence.

    Spoken like a true god-obeyer.

    H/t Omar

  • Catholic leaders are warning women

    From a few days ago, the bishops telling women never mind about Zika and microcephaly, we still forbid you to use contraception, you whores.

    As the Zika virus spreads in Latin America, Catholic leaders are warning women against using contraceptives or having abortions, even as health officials in some countries are advising women not to get pregnant because of the risk of birth defects.

    …

    After a period of saying little, bishops in Latin America are beginning to speak up and reassert the church’s opposition to birth control and abortion — positions that in Latin America are unpopular and often disregarded, even among Catholics.

    Often disregarded, but not always? They should be universally disregarded, because what business is it of the church’s? It’s not the church who will be raising the children, so it’s not the church’s business to order women not to avoid conceiving them. It’s nothing to do with the church at all in any way, and the church should shut right up about it.

    That’s all the more true because the church has a kind of moral authority over many people. It shouldn’t, but it does. Many people think they ought to obey the church, so the church should be very cautious and reflective about what it tells people to do. The church should be horrified itself for telling everyone, including many millions of desperately poor people, not to use contraception. It should realize it’s telling people to fuck up their lives, and stop doing that.

    “Contraceptives are not a solution,” said Bishop Leonardo Ulrich Steiner, the secretary general of the National Council of Bishops of Brazil, and an auxiliary bishop of Brasília, in an interview. “There is not a single change in the church’s position.”

    Yes they are. They are a solution. They’re the solution.

    “The Vatican is very well aware of the seriousness of this issue, and the Holy Father is very aware of it,” Father Rosica said. “We’re waiting to see how the local churches in those countries respond.”

    But Father Rosica said church teaching on abortion and contraception remains the same. The Zika epidemic, he said, presents “an opportunity for the church to recommit itself to the dignity and sacredness of life, even in very precarious moments like this.”

    No. That’s disgusting. That’s flowery sentimental cruel piety at the expense of giving a damn about reality.

  • Eppur si muove

    Well color me surprised – a Catholic institution has budged. A Catholic institution has responded to public outrage, and thought again, and held a meeting, and budged. A Catholic institution has reversed itself on a homophobic policy. Stone the motherfucking crows.

    The St. Mary’s Academy board voted Wednesday night to change the school’s policy on hiring gay employees after facing backlash over the administration’s decision to rescind a job offer to a gay counselor.

    Students and high-profile donor Tim Boyle, CEO of Columbia Sportswear, had earlier condemned the choice not to employ 27-year-old Lauren Brown.

    In response, administrators brought the board together and recommended members vote to expand the hiring policy.

    No doubt they didn’t want to lose the donor, and other donors who might follow. I don’t care. They still budged.

    In July, the Roman Catholic high school reversed its plans to make Brown an academic adviser after learning she was gay, the job applicant said. Friedhoff said the decision was made when Brown indicated she intends to get married.

    Brown’s attorney said the 27-year-old had accepted the position in April and signed an employment contract. Friedhoff said the position was offered in April and a contract was sent to Brown, but administrators never received a signed copy.

    Regardless of the precise reason or whether Brown had signed a contract, the decision not to hire her didn’t sit well with students. St. Mary’s families learned about the situation Tuesday night when the administration emailed parents.

    Students aren’t always right, but sometimes they are. In this case they are.

    About a dozen students showed up Wednesday morning to decorate a statue outside the school with rainbow heart glasses and a St. Mary’s hoodie with “FREE TO BE ME” taped on the front. The teens said the decision didn’t reflect the social justice values of St. Mary’s.

    Good job, teens.

    The original decision could have had financial implications for the school. Major donor Tim Boyle, CEO of Columbia Sportswear, said Wednesday afternoon in a statement that he and his wife had been “extremely disappointed” and believed the original decision should be reversed.

    “Recently, one of us participated in a successful public forum hosted by St. Mary’s addressing how to prepare St. Mary’s students for the work force of the future,” Boyle said in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive. “The news this week is an example of how to not prepare students.  There is no place in the workplace of today, or of the future, for discriminating against an individual based on sexual orientation.”

    Quite right. There’s no place for it because there’s no good reason for it. It was just a thought-free entrenched prejudice, a mindless oook-feeling, and nothing more.

    I found out about this via the Facebook page I stand with Barb Webb. Remember Barb Webb? She taught chemistry at a Catholic school near Detroit for nine years, until they fired her after she told them she was pregnant.

    Webb, 33, says she told the administration last month she was 14 weeks pregnant and offered to take a leave of absence until after her child was born. She says she was told she could resign or be fired. She chose the latter.

    Webb said she does not believe her firing was strictly based on the fact that she is gay, but that it was because she became pregnant outside of a traditional marriage.

    The school’s morality clause, which all teachers are expected to sign, is “quite vague”, Webb said, in that it only states that teachers and other employees must not publicly display or teach anything that contradicts Catholic doctrine. Legal experts say such clauses can often mask unlawful discrimination.

    It would be pleasant to see that school change its policy, and re-hire Barb Webb.

  • Though not proven

    In one Irish diocese there were more than 100 accusations that priests had sexually abused children over a 40 year period, the Irish Examiner reported last year.

    The review of the Dublin Archdiocese by the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church found that allegations were made against three more priests in the last year, bringing to 101 the total of diocesan priests accused of abuse since 1975.

    Concerns about 40 of them arose in the past 10 years. Of those, four were convicted in the criminal courts and 23 were found to involve concerns that were credible, although not proven. In those 27 cases, the diocese substantially restricted or terminated their ministries.

    The diocese acted on even the cases that were found to be credible, although not proven. That’s odd. You’d think they would just say “well it’s not proven, so yaboosucks, we’re not going to do anything.” That’s the standard, isn’t it? Either it’s proven, or it’s not proven and that’s the same as it never happened. Isn’t it? That’s what people keep saying, anyway.

    Of the total 101 accused, 49 are deceased, 34 are living and remain priests of the diocese, and 18 have left the priesthood and/or the diocese. In total, they faced 432 separate allegations of abuse.

    Only nine priests have been convicted of abuse in the criminal courts since 1975, and just 12 in total since 1940, but the diocese has accepted civil responsibility for many more.

    Oh, civil responsibility. Huh. So there is something between conviction in criminal court, and nothing at all. Who knew?

    Some 236 civil actions have been taken against 51 priests or former priests of the diocese, of which 187 have been concluded at a total cost of €20.4m, with 49 cases still continuing.

    Pricey. Maybe for the future they should tell their priests it would be better to skip the child abuse altogether, as a cost-saving measure.

    While acknowledging the legacy of unacknowledged abuse in the diocese, the board described its current performance on child protection issues and abuse allegations in glowing terms.

    That’s fair. So the diocese made the lives of hundreds of children hell for decades, hey, at least they’re doing something about it now. That’s so heroic of them!

    Director of safeguarding in the diocese, Andrew Fagan welcomed the positive comments but said there no room for complacency and he encouraged anyone affected by abuse, who had not yet come forward to try and do so in order to get the help and support they need.

    As opposed to hostility and denial and counterattack? That would be welcome.

    Updating to add: Jason did a very relevant and useful flowchart back in September. Check it out and laugh a bitter laugh.

  • Abortion was just one front in a wider religious war

    Fintan O’Toole provides some background on Ireland’s appalling “Pro-Life” amendment to its constitution.

    The most successful single issue movement in the history of the State, the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC), was established in January 1981 by 13 organisations: the Congress of Catholic Secondary School Parents’ Associations; the Irish Catholic Doctors’ Guild; the Guild of Catholic Nurses; the Guild of Catholic Pharmacists; the Catholic Young Men’s Society; the St Thomas More Society; the Irish Pro-Life Movement; the National Association of the Ovulation Method (“natural” contraception endorsed by the Catholic church); the Council of Social Concern (COSC); the Irish Responsible Society; the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children; the St Joseph’s Young Priests Society (young Catholic priests, that is); and the Christian Brothers Schools Parents’ Federation. The initial meeting was chaired by the head of a 14th organisation that was immensely influential on the campaign behind the scenes, the secretive, all-male brotherhood the Order of the Knights of Columbanus.

    It’s enough to make you want to throw up. Notice that at least two of those groups are not only Catholic but all-male. All-male Catholic groups stripping women of basic rights – not a good look.

    These are the bodies that made Ireland unique in the democratic world in having a ban on abortion in its constitution. In spite of a great deal of revisionism, their sectarian character is obvious: 10 of these bodies were explicitly and exclusively Catholic. The other four were almost entirely made up of conservative Catholic activists. (By contrast, all Irish Protestant churches opposed the amendment.) For all of these groups, abortion was just one front in a wider religious war.

    On Protestantism, on women, on secularism, on the whole notion and possibility of not taking orders from the Vatican.

    A guy called John O’Reilly started it all going.

    John O’Reilly explicitly regarded a successful anti-abortion amendment as a prelude to action against contraception and “illegitimacy”: “The campaign for a pro-life amendment would enjoy widespread support now and the success of the campaign would serve to halt the permissive tide in other areas.”

    For O’Reilly “pro-life” was the opposite of “anti-life”, a term which incorporated the availability of contraception and (weirdly) the rising number of babies born out of wedlock.

    Because the most important thing of all is to make sure that nobody ever ever ever just plain has sex for the fun of it. God no. It has to be made as rule-bound and joyless and like a prison sentence as it can possibly be. Except for priests, of course.

    The Irish Responsible Society, of which five key PLAC leaders were members, was the Irish branch of the group led by the English right-wing Catholic activist Valerie Riches (now a papal dame). For Riches, the degeneration of society through sexual permissiveness was a conspiracy driven by International Planned Parenthood.

    Sex! Sex sex sex! It’s dirty, it’s terrifying, it’s the swirling vortex of hell that will suck you in if you don’t work night and day to forbid everything you can think of.

    The first action of her Irish followers was to campaign against a small State grant to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Its next campaign was against the removal of the stigma of illegitimacy from children born out of wedlock.

    This is the ideology – sectarian, paranoid, apocalyptic – that gave us the eighth amendment. It was utterly dismissive of any qualifications to its absolutist views and saw all “sob stories” as liberal conspiracies.

    Bernadette Bonar, a leading PLAC and Responsible Society figure, warned of pro-abortion conspirators turning up at a TD’s clinics: “seemingly respectable little women giving him sob stories about 12-year-olds being raped.”

    Loretto Browne, also a prominent PLAC and Responsible Society leader, told me in 1982 that rape very seldom results in pregnancy because “men that go in for rape are usually not fertile, they tend to be impotent”.

    Uh-huh. The body has a way of shutting that whole thing down.

    These were the people who created the Irish abortion regime. Most of them are long gone from the public stage – COSC and the Irish Responsible Society no longer exist. Their world view is marginal. But their legacy abides for women not born when it was in its pomp.

    Their worldview isn’t marginal in the US. I wish to hell it were.

  • Like a trucking company

    Cardinal Pell is another one vying for the Zero Empathy Remark of the Year Award.

    Cardinal George Pell has strongly defended the so-called Melbourne Response as Australia’s first comprehensive redress scheme for victims of clerical sexual abuse at the royal commission.

    Appearing at the commission via video link from the Vatican in Rome on Thursday night, Cardinal Pell likened the Catholic Church’s responsibility for child abuse to that of a ”trucking company”. If a driver sexually assaulted a passenger they picked up along the way, he said, ”I don’t think it appropriate for the … leadership of that company be held responsible.”

    What’s wrong with that analogy? Well let’s see…

    1. The Catholic church doesn’t pick up passengers along the way. Its relationship to its child parishioners is not similar to that of a truck driver to a hitch hiker.
    2. The Catholic church sees itself as the source of absolute moral truth. Trucking companies don’t see themselves that way.
    3. The relationship between the Catholic hierarchy and its priests is not like that of a trucking company to its employees.

    But even more to the point, it’s just so…shoulder-shrugging, indifferent, blame-shifting, evasive.

    Sean Cash, a lawyer for abuse victim Paul Hersbach, challenged the trucking company analogy, saying that because the Catholic Church was an organisation of the ”highest integrity” it owed victims a far greater legal and moral responsibility. He said it should not impede victims’ ability to receive full and fair compensation.

    ”We were among the front-runners in Melbourne in addressing these scandals and I would suggest to you that that is entirely consistent with Catholic tradition and the teachings of Christ,” Cardinal Pell replied.

    Jesus had teachings about how the church should deal with rapist priests? I missed that part.

  • Those defections do not have legal effect

    J P O’Malley learns that the Irish Catholic church will not let you leave.

    From aged 12, I had no belief, whatsoever, in the concept of a divine being.

    By the time I was in my 20s, I was a militant-atheist.

    And after my close reading of the ‘Ferns’, ‘Murphy’, and ‘Ryan Reports’, I was fully convinced that this was not an organisation I wanted to be associated with in any way.

    It came as a huge surprise to me, then, last October, after I wrote to Reverend Fintan Gavin, the assistant chancellor of the Dublin Dioceses, asking if I could formally leave the Catholic Church, to be told that it was impossible.

    There’s this 1983 Vatican “law,” you see, that was supposed to allow members to “defect.” (To what? Why defect? Why can’t people just leave? It’s not parenthood, after all. You can’t just leave parenthood, unless you’re a Class A Shit, but you can leave groups and clubs and political parties and, yes, religions.) But then there was a new law later on.

    Fintan Gavin reiterated that since canon law was changed in 2009 “those [former] defections do not have legal effect.” In other words: the Catholic Church refuses to allow its members to walk away voluntarily.

    When one has no affiliation — culturally, spiritually, or otherwise — to such an organisation, it’s easy to read this letter with a dose of Father Ted-style humour. But while the Church and State are completely separate — in terms of the common law in Ireland — that relationship has never been as simple as either the Irish government, or the Catholic Church, presently define it.

    Since the founding of the Irish State, in 1922, the Church has provided a free service to the Irish government: a de facto, bureaucratic invisible hand to keep the population under control. If the Soviet Union had the Cheka to enforce public morality through fear, Ireland had priests and bishops. The costumes may have been different, but the theme remained the same: unquestionable, totalitarian power.

    While these methods of coercion were never legally recognised in the Irish Constitution, the country was, one could argue, unofficially a theocracy until the early 1990s.

    It wasn’t an entirely a free service. The state actually paid the church for running the Industrial “schools” and the mother-baby prisons. The state paid per head, and the church made a nice little living off the payments. And the population was by god kept under control.

    Helen O’Shea, the current secretary of Atheist Ireland, who was able to formally defect from the Catholic Church pre-2009 — before the law was revoked by the Vatican — says that in the interests of democratic accountability the Irish state must operate in a consistent manner for all its citizens in terms of religious freedom.

    “[Many] Irish schools are almost exclusively controlled by Catholic management. And when places are limited, a baptism certificate is often required. This is unacceptable in a supposedly non-theocratic state,” she said.

    “Atheist Ireland are currently investigating setting up a website, so people can document their wish to leave the Church formally. It’s very ignorant [of the Church] to insist on membership when an individual requests the opposite,” said O’Shea.

    I think that should happen. It would be very good for the church to be embarrassed by a long long long list of people who have left the church but are still counted as members by that church.

  • The bishops renewed their obsessions

    The AP reported the other day on the meeting of the US Conference of Catholic bishops.

    NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops meeting Wednesday renewed their focus on abortion and gay marriage under Pope Francis.

    The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to make only limited revisions to a guide they publish every presidential election year on church teaching, voting and public policy. The bishops also reaffirmed their fight for broader religious exemptions to laws recognizing gay marriage and a requirement in the Affordable Care Act that employers provide health insurance covering birth control.

    That’s what they do. That’s what they’re preoccupied with. That’s what they care about. That’s their raison d’être. Not love, not compassion, not making a better world – just peering at people’s sex lives and doing their best to control them and fuck them up. They fuck you up, your Catholic bishops.

    Francis has said the church has been alienating Catholics by focusing more on divisive social issues than on mercy and compassion.

    The bishops’ document on political responsibility, titled “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” has been published every four years since 1976, and has become a point of contention within the church over which issues voters should consider most important: abortion or social justice. The bishops voted Wednesday to incorporate Francis’ teachings into the document, but rejected a complete rewrite in favor of limited changes instead.

    “The question of abortion will remain as very important,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, Texas, after the vote at the national assembly in New Orleans. “There are pillars to the house and it is one of the pillars.”

    Says a high official of the institution that for decades tortured children and let them die of neglect and worse.

    The bishops also voted to renew their committee on religious liberty, which has led their campaign for broader protection for religious charities and for individual business owners with religious objections to birth control, same-sex marriage and other issues.

    It’s not “religious liberty” – it’s religious control and domination for them, at the expense of everyone who has no desire to be controlled and dominated by the Catholic church. What about our religious liberty, eh? That should include liberty from the control and domination of Catholic bishops.

     

  • Frank and the devil

    Cool headline in the Telegraph –

    Decline of religious belief means we need more exorcists, say Catholics

    Well of course they do. Jobs for the boys, eh?

    Then there’s the subhead –

    Decline of religion in the West has created a rise in black magic, Satanism and the occult

    Oh it’s our fault? I beg to differ. I think you can see it rather as a common taste for made-up spooky stuff, that can go either with religion or with black magic and the rest of the silly menu, or even, adventurously if not orthodoxly, both.

    The decline of religious belief in the West and the growth of secularism has “opened the window” to black magic, Satanism and belief in the occult, the organisers of a conference on exorcism have said.

    The six-day meeting in Rome aims to train about 200 Roman Catholic priests from more than 30 countries in how to cast out evil from people who believe themselves to be in thrall to the Devil.

    To train them? It’s so technical that they need training?

    The conference, “Exorcism and Prayers of Liberation”, has also attracted psychiatrists, sociologists, doctors and criminologists in what the Church called a “multi-disciplinary” approach to exorcisms.

    Giuseppe Ferrari, from GRIS, a Catholic research group that organised the conference, said there was an ever growing need for priests to be trained to perform exorcisms because of the increasing number of lay people tempted to dabble in black magic, paganism and the occult.

    “We live in a disenchanted society, a secularised world that thought it was being emancipated, but where religion is being thrown out, the window is being opened to superstition and irrationality,” said Mr Ferrari.

    As opposed to the Catholic church and its “teachings,” which have nothing to do with superstition and irrationality. Hmmm.

    In the popular imagination, exorcisms evoke images of black-clad priests holding aloft silver crucifixes while trying to rid frothing, wild-eyed victims of Satanic possession.

    The Church tries to play down the more lurid associations but at the same time insists that the Devil exists and must be fought on a daily basis.

    Which is to say, the church wants everything. It wants its dignity, so it tries to play down the more lurid stuff, but at the same time, it also wants its authority and power, which depend wholly on the gap between church “teachings” and observable reality, so it insists that the Devil exists. The result is risible in the extreme.

    Pope Francis has frequently alluded to the Devil in his homilies and addresses since being elected to succeed Benedict XVI last March.

    In a homily this week, he said that the Devil was behind the persecution of early Christian martyrs, who were murdered for their faith. The “struggle between God and the Devil” was constant and ongoing, he said.

    Bollocks, Frank. It’s all bullshit, the Hollywood version and your version.

     

     

  • Abuse at the hands of the brothers who had been entrusted with their care

    Amanda Banks at the West Australian tells us how the Catholic church in Western Australia dealt with abuse victims. With generosity and remorse and eagerness to make amends? No. With self-interested self-protective fighting and coercion.

    The Catholic Church and Christian Brothers fought a class action by abuse victims from WA orphanages at every turn, using their strong legal position to open settlement negotiations with the offer that the men pay their costs.

    By “the men” she means the abuse victims – so the church opened negotiations by demanding that the victims pay the church’s costs. The victimizer opened negotiations with a demand that the victims pay costs.

    Slater and Gordon lawyer Hayden Stephens has told the royal commission public hearing in Perth this morning of the uphill battle faced by hundreds of men who signed retainers for the national law firm to take on the class action.

    Mr Stephens said while a trust of $3.5 million was eventually settled in 1996 after a three-year legal stoush, the Christian Brothers made it clear from the outset that under no circumstances would any agreement be seen to be a payment of compensation to victims.

    So much for generosity and remorse and eagerness to make amends.

    “Although this amount does not fairly reflect the suffering that these men suffered and experienced at these institutions, it was the best we could achieve,” Mr Hayden told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

    “To be blunt, the trustees of the Christian Brothers had their knee on our client’s throat and there was little opportunity for our clients to flex their negotiation muscle, or us on their behalf, with the judicial decisions that had preceded the negotiations.”

    See? They’re like anyone else. They look out for themselves, like anyone else. They’re not better than other people. Their religion doesn’t make them good.

    The first three days of the hearing were dominated by evidence of 11 former residents of the Christian Brothers’ Bindoon, Tardun, Castledare and Clontarf orphanages.

    The men each gave harrowing accounts of sexual, physical and mental abuse, as well as neglect and cruelty, at the hands of the brothers who had been entrusted with their care.

    Some of them men have also expressed feeling demeaned and insulted by the class action process, which in some cases resulted in payouts of as a little as $2000.

    They’re just racketeers, the men who run the Catholic church. Don’t let them fool you.

  • You’re in good hands with the Vatican

    From last week – Cardinal George Pell is leaving Australia for a new job in the Vatican, and for a good-bye present he told a royal commission that priests should be insured against being sued for child sexual abuse. Elizabeth Farrelly is…shall we say, taken aback.

    Our man in purple, our alpha priest, moral paragon. Our Vatican princeling, just days from taking up his dauphindom in Rome: he said that? He dropped this fissile solipsism on our public debate and left, smacking the dust from his hands like, we’re done now, right?

    For this was no dinner party throw-away. The cardinal – fully frocked, schooled and premeditated – breathed his proposition into the stone tablets of a royal commission. He wanted it recorded and kept. Forever.

    But insurance? Does he think child sex is some unavoidable occupational hazard? Something a priest will sooner or later fall to? An accident? If you wanted to maximise the damage already done to countless children, you’d be hard put to find a surer way, or crueller.

    And does he think the church should just be able to put in a claim and then sail on majestically unperturbed?

    Consider for a moment. Is abuse insurance like car insurance, green-slip to start and no-claim bonus for good behaviour? Or is it like health insurance where you select your cover to suit. Ten grand, say, for talking dirty to preschoolers. A hundred grand for touching. What, half-a-mill for penetration? Or is professional indemnity the model – the surgeon’s slip of the knife, the architect’s of the pen?

    Apologies if you think this talk indelicate but, as the sex fiend said to the shrink, I’m not the one drawing the dirty pictures here.

    Insurance is risk management.  Pell’s purpose, one can only presume, was to downscale the entire abuse project from major moral issue to mere workplace risk. This is appeasement, the moral equivalent of adapting to, rather than mitigating, climate change. Is this what confession teaches? Outsource your risk?

    It’s business. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. He’s got to answer to the stockholders.

    If this were some dumb corporation – some downtown retailer, say – a far lesser abuse scenario would have seen heads roll, many and large. Were the abuser Joe Blow, he’d be jailed as a rock spider. Were the abuse organised, secret, power-protected, woe betide, especially the ringleader.

    Yet Paragon Pell shrugs, denies responsibility and skips away to Rome. A fine example he set, squirming in the witness box, blaming his colleagues, his lawyers and the children themselves. Yet the church, far from enforcing virtue, promotes him.

    It’s how they roll.

     

  • Clergy aren’t obliged to tell magistrates

    A week ago the Italian Bishops’ Conference published guidance saying that they don’t have to report suspected sexual abuse of children to the police.

    Fair enough. They agreed it among themselves, so it’s none of anyone else’s business, right? That’s democracy.

    The Italian Bishops’ Conference said the guidelines published Friday reflected suggestions from the Vatican’s office that handles sex abuse investigations.

    Victims have long denounced how bishops systematically covered up abuse by shuffling pedophile priests around while keeping prosecutors in the dark. Only in 2010 did the Vatican instruct bishops to report abuse to police — but only where required by law.

    Well of course only where required by law. You don’t expect them to do the right thing even when not forced to do you?! Don’t be silly. They’re human. They’re not going to rat out a friend and colleague just because some snotty little kid whines about being fucked up the ass. Besides priests are special! They’re perfect, because of that thing Jesus said. Snotty little kids are anything but special. (But. I said But. Huh huh huh.) Snotty little kids grow up to be grubby smelly adults who aren’t priests. (We don’t rape children who have a Vocation of course. Usually. Unless they’re exceptionally pretty.)

    The Italian guidelines cite a 1985 treaty between the Vatican and Italy stipulating that clergy aren’t obliged to tell magistrates about information obtained through their religious ministry.

    There you go. The Vatican got Italy to agree to that, so they’re home free.

    Also besides, the whole reason they have this policy is to protect the victims. No really. The cardinal said so. The Tablet reports, you decide.

    The president of the Italian bishops’ conference has defended a decision to exempt bishops from having to report claims of abuse by clergy to the police, because he said Italian law does not require it and victims may not want them to.

    Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco told reporters on Saturday that the decision by the Italian bishops’ conference would not fall foul of Vatican rules. “The Vatican requires national laws to be respected, and we know that there is no such duty [to report abuse] under Italian law,” he said on the sidelines of a meeting in Genoa.

    The bishops’ conference published guidelines on Friday stipulating that clergy are under no obligation to inform authorities about suspected abuse but have a “moral duty” to act to protect the vulnerable and “contribute to the common good”.

    And the common good of course requires that priests take care of themselves first of all.

    The abuse survivors group SNAP were highly critical. They said: “The stunning, depressing and irresponsible contradiction between what Vatican officials say about abuse and do about abuse continues.” They also criticised Pope Francis for not amending the Vatican requirement, which “give Italian bishops permission to ignore or conceal the rape of boys or girls,” they charged.

    In Feburary the UN denounced the Vatican’s record on child protection. In its 16-page report it said: “The Committee is particularly concerned that in dealing with allegations of child sexual abuse, the Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the protection of the perpetrators above children’s best interests.”

    Bagnasco said some victims may not want to press charges. “What is important is to respect the will of the victims and their relatives, who may not want to report the abuse, for personal reasons,” he said.

    And that’s what they’ve been concerned about all this time. Of course it is.