Cardinal Pell:Do The Decent Thing

An Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church is long overdue in Australia.

The stress and heartbreak that the victims of sexual abuse, and their families, go through is horrendous. I do not believe that the Catholic Church even comes close to understanding this. If it did, would the Vatican have allowed this abuse to go on for centuries? Perhaps it’s not a question of understanding and empathy. It’s most likely all about power, wealth and status. I believe that the number of reported abuses is just the tip of the iceberg, because research has shown that is the tendency with all forms of sexual abuse. It can take half of a victim’s lifetime, or more, to just gain the strength to talk about the abuse. To quote Chrissie Foster: “It takes 40 or 50 years for children to talk about what has happened to them, and it just never stops”.

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Chrissie & Anthony Foster

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It one such case, two of Chrissie and Anthony Fosters’ daughters were raped by a Catholic Priest. In an article about the Fosters in Catholica, March 2011, the writer refers to the abuser as “A Holy Roman Catholic Priest”.  I think this is indicative of the mentality of the Catholic hierarchy, in that they choose this highly inflated title to describe a paedophile. It sends a message that this rapist continues to be treated with respect by his peers and the Vatican!

Chrissie and Anthony Foster are the parents of three daughters, two of whom were raped as little girls by a paedophile priest, Kevin O’Donnell. One of the daughters eventually took her own life in despair after a long period of self harm. The second daughter who was raped, after a similarly long period of self harm, walked in front of a speeding car while intoxicated and today requires round the clock nursing care that will continue for the rest of her life.

Mrs Foster has written a book ‘Hell on the Way to Heaven‘ in which she cites six bishops who failed to take decisive action following several parents’ complaints regarding Kevin O’Donnell. It is difficult to comprehend why Cardinal Pell is still in Office given what has been presented in Mrs Foster’s book. “Cardinal Pell has more front than Myers Department Store and it will probably wash over him like water off a duck’s back”.  Read Mrs Foster’s book and judge for yourself, the failure of these six bishops to protect children from sexual abuse by Kevin O’Donnell.  Cardinal Pell appears to bury his head in the sand over this issue, and still there has been no effective inquiry.

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The Fosters are driving the push for an inquiry into sexual abuse by clergy in Victoria.  As quoted in the Waverley Leader September 13, “Two signatures stand between an inquiry into the alleged sexual abuse of two Oakleigh girls, and other alleged victims by Victorian clergy”.  Labour MP, Anne Barker handed the proposed terms of reference for an inquiry to Attorney-General Robert Clark, recently. If Mr Clark and Premier Ted Baillieu, sign  the four page document, a Royal Commission of Inquiry will be launched.  The Terms of Reference state that: “Since 1993, more than 65 clergy who have served in Victoria, have been convicted of abuse”. These figures are staggering. But the Catholic hierarchy have stipulated that they will not deviate from its ‘Melbourne Response Programme’ which was implemented 15 years ago. However, going on past experience of the way the Catholic Church has protected its paedophile priests, we must have nothing less than a Royal Commission of Inquiry, which would be  totally outside the influence of the Vatican. Mr Foster believes A  Royal Commission is the only way to expose the secretive behaviour of the Church, and bring it under full scrutiny. A decision is pending. Let’s hope that in the event of a Royal Commission of Inquiry in Victoria, other states will follow suit.

See  previous posts:  Clerical Paedophilia         /    Irish PM Blasts Vatican

Clerical Paedophilia; Centuries Old Timebomb

DYSFUNCTIONAL. Disconnected. Elitist. Narcissistic. The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church downplayed the torture and rape of children or ”managed” it to uphold the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation.

The above damning indictment of the culture at the heart of the Vatican came not from a communist demagogue or a firebrand ayatollah but from Enda Kenny, the Prime Minister of Ireland, one of the most Catholic countries in the world. This Irish PM is a true hero. As the saying goes, it only takes one good man…

The Irish government has also warned the Church it can no longer even consider the seal of the confessional to be sacrosanct, promising to impose a five-year jail sentence for anyone found guilty of not passing information on child sexual abuse to state authorities.

Source-Douglas Dalby, a Dublin based journalist.

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See previous post:    Irish Prime Minister Blasts Vatican

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People world-wide must be growing weary by now of the endless cases of child sex abuse which is endemic within the Catholic Church. No other organisation has been so infiltrated by the sheer numbers of clerical paedophiles.  It’s no wonder that the Vatican has been labelled ‘the gay men’s club’. The abuse has been going on for hundreds of years because the great power and wealth of this establishment has been able to cover it up.  It has blatantly ignored the damage done to children to protect its image of Godliness and purity. I would love to know what numbers of the congregation have left the church because of the ongoing revelations. I believe that it is not merely a case of an organisation of celibates attracting paedophiles, as some would have us believe.  There appears to be a deep psychological flaw in the Church’s teachings and if you read enough about convicted priests, there is this view that it is ‘ok’ to rape little boys and fallen women, as long as you leave the ‘sacred image of Mary’  alone ie in the form of ‘saintly’ mothers here on earth. These paedophiles show little remorse and their colleagues pity them their “sins of affliction” as though they are the sole victims.

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How corrupt is the Vatican?

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Two other major reports published since 2005 also breached the iron walls of Vatican silence, but the Cloyne Report is different because it found systematic sexual abuse of children was still a reality as recently as 2008 and the church had been paying lip service to its own 1996 guidelines on child protection, which include the mandatory reporting of suspected abuse to state authorities. However, it was implicit that the ‘mandatory reporting’ was at the discretion of  local Bishops. In fact. Bishops reported abuse cases to the Vatican heirarchy which enabled  it to cover up the abuse and to move  the paedophile elsewhere. The Vatican effectively encouraged bishops to ignore its own guidelines by dismissing them as “merely a discussion document”. PM Kenny’s confrontational address to the Irish parliament last month reflected the collective mood and tapped the raw pain and sense of betrayal felt by people across Ireland after the recent publication of the Cloyne Report.  The state-funded independent report detailed numerous allegations of abuse by priests and a failure to report them in the rural diocese of Cloyne from 1996 to 2009. Pointedly, the local Catholic bishops didn’t rate a mention in PM Kenny’s speech; he saved his ire for their bosses in Rome. PM Kenny’s speech revealed that the Cloyne Report brought the government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an “unprecedented juncture”. The Cloyne Report exposed a more serious issue than previous reports. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse proved an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.

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Formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger-Currently Pope Benedict XVl

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See post   ‘The Case of the Pope’  by Geoffrey Robertson, in which he examines,  from a legal perspective, the Vatican as a sovereign state and its handling of paedophile priests and their victims

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The tide appears to be changing in Ireland. Most people still profess faith in God but church doctrine no longer governs personal spirituality. Indeed, there are now calls to remove Catholicism  from every aspect of public life. Some Catholic parents are even doing the unthinkable and choosing not to baptise their children. While they may still regard themselves as Catholic, albeit with a small ”c”, contrary to stereotypes, this is no priest-ridden, theocratic backwater. The Catholic Church may continue to supervise the education system and control many hospitals, but for the most part, this is a cosmopolitan, urbanised, and secular, society. Increasingly, people in Ireland confine their church attendance to life changing events – christenings, weddings and funerals. Indeed, churches are more like mausoleums to past glories, with pews mostly empty or dotted with a few pensioners. The drift away from Catholicism has been gathering pace for some time, but revelations of the devious deceit and persistent cover-up of child abuse detailed since 2005 in the Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne Reports have transformed passive indifference into white-hot rage.

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In many ways the Catholic Church in Ireland is being devastated by a catastrophe of its own making. Its abuse of power also extends back  to its role in the so-called industrial schools and Magdalene laundries, places of institutionalised slavery where children and young women were routinely, physically, sexually, and emotionally assaulted. The Magdalene laundries, which operated before the formation of the state in 1922 until 1996, were effectively church businesses where women and girls were imprisoned and forced to work in appalling conditions for little or no pay. Many of them suffered a lifetime of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of the nuns in charge. In many cases their ”crime” was to be a single mother. Only now are their stories being widely circulated and their campaign for redress gathering pace.

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See post  Banished Babies

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So far, 18 religious orders have agreed to pay €600 million ($A783 million) in compensation to industrial school victims. The state has agreed to pay €1.3 billion for effectively allowing the church to run riot with its most vulnerable citizens.  American Catholic Churches have already paid compensation in the millions of dollars and incidents of the cover-up of sexual abuse by priests are still being currently exposed.

Source: Douglas Dalby, Dublin Journalist. _______________________________________________  

Riccardo Seppia on the left

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Christopher Jarvis: Child Protection Chief for the Catholic Church 

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One wonders if the Catholic Church can sink any lower.

Christopher Jarvis is headed to jail for a long stint,  following his conviction for making, possessing, and distributing, child pornography, of which images were found on his home computer and work laptop.  The laptop in question was provided to him to aid in his duties as a Catholic Church Child Protection Chief. The Catholic Church is the largest employer of sex offenders and pedophiles on the planet.

The Child Protection Chief’s  job was to monitor church groups to ensure paedophiles did not gain access to children in the Church’s congregations.  But Jarvis was caught by police in March with more than 4,000 child porn images on both his personal and work computers. He admitted 12 counts of making, ­possessing and distributing indecent ­images when he appeared before ­magistrates in Plymouth and is likely to face jail when he returns to court for sentencing next month. Jarvis worked the Diocese of ­Plymouth for nine years.

A Vatican spokesperson claims that the church removed him from his position as soon as his sex predator status was discerned. Who can possibly believe any statements issued by the  Vatican in light of its record to date. 

In yet another shocking case:  Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51-year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested on pedophilia and drug charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile-phone conversations, Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. Seppia makes his request to the drug dealer clear: “I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues”.  Now, priests would know all about families with problem children, wouldn’t they?

According to investigators, Seppia told his friend, a former seminarian and barman who is currently under investigation himself, that the town’s malls were the best places to entice minors. In tapped phone conversations the two cursed and swore against God. The priest is charged with having attempted to kiss and touch an underage altar boy and of having exchanged cocaine for sexual intercourse with boys over 18. Seppia’s defense lawyers are expected to argue that the monitored conversations,  “were just words, sex games that were played by adults”. It was just a game even when he claimed to have “kissed on the mouth” a 15-year-old altar boy, according to the defense.  The altar boy in question confirmed that the kisses did in fact happen. These are games played by supposedly celibate priests? It beggars belief! Seppia also served as Pope Benedict’s official advisor on pedophilia; a child-raping pedophile himself?

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In Australia it seems, the Catholic Church hierarchy is no more keen on investigating sex abuse by priests, than anywhere else:

AN inquiry into suicides among victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and brothers in Victoria would achieve little, a Catholic bishop says.

Australian police investigating the case of convicted pedophile Christian Brother Robert Best, believe at least 26 victims of sexual abuse at schools in which he taught have committed suicide. One of the investigating officers wants a parliamentary inquiry to investigate the deaths.

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Christian Brother Robert Best

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“If it helps the victims I’d be more than happy for it to go ahead,” Bishop of Ballarat Peter Connors told AAP.  “I don’t think they’ll learn very much more … I’m convinced we’ve done the best we can in more recent years.” Best, who taught at schools throughout Victoria, including Ballarat, will be sentenced on Monday after pleading guilty to 27 charges of abusing 11 boys between 1969 and 1988. Best was principal at St Alipius primary school in Ballarat at the same time convicted serial paedophile and priest Gerald Ridsdale was the school chaplain. But Bishop Connors said not even revelations from Detective Sergeant Kevin Carson that 26 young men had killed themselves after being abused by priests and brothers in Ballarat convinced him that more would be learnt from an inquiry. “I think we’ve learnt a lot of things about what is appropriate behaviour and what’s not appropriate behaviour,” Bishop Connors said.  “I think people are very well informed nowadays as to what’s inappropriate approaches from a male”,  the Bishop contnued. But I would ask, what have these lame statements got to do with opening an inquiry in to the abuse? While conceding the abuse of children was wrong, he said that in the past it had not always been clear to everyone what was appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.  I don’t believe he could make such a claim. Surely grown men in the priesthood, one would assume, should have known what was appropriate behaviour?

Bishop Connor’s ramblings don’t make sense. “In the past a lot of ignorance was there on the part of lots of people. Parents didn’t understand, sometimes bishops didn’t understand. We have no excuse now.” As to whether there was an excuse when Ridsdale and Best were abusing boys, Bishop Connors said he did not know. Among the charges laid against Best in Victoria’s County Court last month were details of him raping a nine-year-old boy in his office. The court heard that after Best raped him, the boy thought he was going to die and blacked out. Bishop Connors said in the past 14 years he had spoken to more than 30 victims of Ridsdale and other priests in the Ballarat diocese. But he said none had told him they were also abused by Best. “I can’t remember them saying they were victims of Brother Best as well,” he said. The bishop said he had no reason to meet Best’s victims “because he being a Christian Brother, I’m not responsible for him.” Another stupid answer. Yet he conceded that some of Ridsdale’s victims he had met could also have been abused by Best, because  both men were there at the same time. Bishop Connors says the church has paid some victims far more than the $70,000 the Archdiocese of Melbourne says should be paid for the worst cases of child assault. Others have been paid less but overall victims had received “a considerable amount”. He is now waiting to see if any of those victims will come forward in two civil compensation cases set to be mounted against Best and whether the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat will be named in the actions. The statements made by Bishop Connors tells me that the Vatican does not employ the right sort of specialists to deal with sexual abuse cases. This is part of the problem.  Bishop Connors, like other priest and Bishops, is trained to minister to the spritual needs of their congregations, not to deal with thousands of sexual abuse victims.

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ABC News Update on Brother Best 8/08/2011:

Christian Brother Robert Best jailed for sex abuse of Victorian school boys.

Robert Best has been sentenced by the Court to 14 years imprisonment  for abusing 11 boys, mainly aged between eight and 11, but will probably serve a minimum term of 11 years. Seventy-year-old Robert Best taught at schools in Ballarat, Box Hill and Geelong between the 1960s and the 1980s.  During the sentencing, Best stood in the dock without emotion. His many victims were in court and shouted at Best as he was led away.

Civil claims lawyer Dr Vivian Waller:  The Catholic Church, and particularly Christian Brothers, who supported Brother Best throughout, now need to take the next step on the road to recovery for these victims and assist them with their treatment and education. We’ll be claiming damages for pain and suffering and for the cost of medical treatment, and other special damages that will assist these victims to recover from what they’ve been through.

Victims believe Best is unrepentant. “He doesn’t show any remorse.”

See relevant posts:

Celibacy & Sexual Abuse

& Catholic Dichotomy of the Female & Abuse of Children

Banished Babies

The book ‘Banished Babies’ by Mike Milotte, is about babies born in Ireland to unmarried mothers.   But we now know, banished babies were also born to illegitimate mothers in  New Zealand, Australia, America and England. More countries where this practise took place may yet come to light.  Australian Banished Babies want an apology. You might say “But this happened last Century”.  The thing is, the wounds left in these heartbreaking cases, never heal.

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See Adoption: The Open Wound That Never Heals

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‘Banished Babies’ were those babies taken from their unmarried mothers at birth.  I believe that the word ‘taken’ in this instance is a misnomer. It should read ‘ripped’, because that’s how it felt to the young mothers. I know this personally from my own mother’s case. This ‘baby snatching’ as others call it, was not for altruistic purposes; rather it was following Catholic dogma issued by the Vatican’s Office of the Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly Office of the Holy Inquisition).   It was certainly not for the welfare of the infants, or their mothers.  No.  It was to remove these babies from their mothers who were seen by the Catholic Church as sinners who had to be punished. In the nuns’ minds, indoctrinated by the Church, the babies themselves were being saved from the clutches of satan and were ‘sold’, mostly to wealthy American couples, who, it was stipulated, had to be of the Catholic Faith.  It was strictly enforced by the Church, that neither mother or infant would ever be able to trace each other, and this caused even more heartbreak decades later.   (See my post about Philomena Lee). Large sums of money were exchanged for the privilege of ‘buying a newborn’, donation being the euphemism used. Ironic, isn’t it?  So much of that wealth the Church received, is now being paid out to even more victims of the Catholic Church; in the form of compensation  to  thousands of families whose children were sexually abused by paedophile priests.

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For all the mothers and babies who never found each other

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Between the end of WWII and 1965 more than 2,200 Irish infants were adopted out of the country, mostly by hopeful parents in the U.S. All the adoptive parents were, by mandate of the church in Ireland, Catholic. Until the late 1990′s and the work of Irish journalist Michael Milotte this was a fact known to few in Ireland and fewer in the U.S. In Ireland Milotte’s work, emphasising both the emotional and physical brutalisation of the birth mothers and the country’s loss of vital human capital, led to a great furor.

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In 2001, the Washington Post reported:

Milotte, a senior reporter for the Irish television network RTE, says life was particularly hard for the mothers in these convents, which were largely self-sustaining thanks to the women’s labour but also received public funding. In some cases, he says, the priests and nuns received money from the adoptive parents, who paid “confinement and medical costs” associated with their child’s birth.

“Where did the money go?” he wonders. “It sustained the people who ran the institutions in a manner they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.”  But money likely wasn’t the primary motivator, he says. Rather, there was a demand for children, and many of the nuns believed they were doing God’s work by sending some of Ireland‘s social outcasts to a better life in the land of opportunity.

“They thought they were doing good,” says Milotte in a phone interview from Dublin. “The fact that people might have rights didn’t enter into their thinking. They thought they knew best. If, in doing the best thing, there was an opportunity to make money, that was all the better.”  In those postwar days, it was not uncommon for Irish children to be adopted by U.S. military and government employees living abroad, Milotte says.

The birth mothers of these children spent their pregnancies and post-natal, pre-adoption lives in varioushomes, often convents, for girls and women who were seen by the conservative Catholic culture as shame-worthy moral degenerates. The horrific conditions that these women underwent was recently dramatized in the movie the Magdelene Sisters.

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Milotte spoke with NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling upon release of his book Banished Babies in May of 1998:

Many of these women were seen as the next thing to prostitutes, and were very often told that when their identities became known. Even when girls got pregnant, very often they didn’t get married even if — because there was the stigma attached to having had sex before marriage. So even where a relationship endured, the child would be given up for adoption. And it was all done in secret.

I am one of those kids given up for adoption. It was in that interview in May of 1998, two days after I returned to Chicago following my mother’s funeral, that I learned of the controversy. I have always known that I was adopted, that I was a ‘true Irishman’, and I had always been proud and honored by the distinction. In the days immediately following my mom’s death I told my Dad that I had never for a second doubted who my ‘real’ parents were, that he and my mom were the only ones who can lay claim to me. I feel no different today.

None-the-less, as the NPR story continued I found myself getting information that I’m sure even they didn’t have.

ZWERDLING:  Here’s one of the most curious aspects of this story.It’s hard enough for most women to give up a baby for adoption during the first few hours or weeks of its life. But church officials forced the young mothers to stay in their convents and raise their own infants for at least one year or more before adoptive families could come and get them.Reporter Mike Milotte says he’s turned up cases where young women changed their minds after their babies were born and tried to leave the convents. (This also happened to my mother in New Zealand). But the nuns sent guards to capture the women and bring them back.For her part, Mary O’Connor says, she knew she’d have to give her baby away. She felt she literally had no choice. But by the time the nuns came to take her son, she’d been raising him for 17 months. Then one evening, O’Connor says, a nun told her, “Get him ready. We’re giving him away in the morning.”

O’CONNOR: So she just carried it over to the convent. There was two parts, like there was a hospital part where the children were kept and then there was the convent part. And the child was brought over to the convent part. And there was three steps up. You went in the side door and there were three steps up. And they went to the top of the steps and they said, “Just say goodbye now. That’s it.”

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For more about my mother’s lost children & the heartlessness of the Catholic Church:

  ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar? – A Passionate Quest to Find Answers for Generations of Defeated Mothers’.

Ireland’s PM Blasts Vatican’s Response To Sexual Abuse

Pope Benedict XVI’s letter relating to the Cloyne Report has infuriated Ireland’s Prime Minister and the Irish victims of paedophile priests.  People from several countries have been hoping for constructive comments in the letter from the Vatican regarding sex abuse scandals, but they will once again be disappointed.

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Pope Benedict XVI

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Vatican-approved cover-ups of the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests, have been going on for centuries in parishes and schools.  My own great-grandmother, then 14 years old, was raped by a Catholic priest in Rome in the 19^th Century.  She was sent off to London to have the resultant baby while the priest’s name was protected. I’d hate to imagine how many other girls might have suffered the same fate because the Vatican turned a blind eye.   The Vatican has never put children’s welfare first in these horrendous scandals.  Foremost in the Vatican’s responses to thousands of allegations of abuse, is to protect the Catholic Church at all costs, then the abusing priests.  Some see the present Pope’s position as difficult because he was formerly the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Once The Holy Office of the Holy Inquisition), which makes, and enforces, doctrinal laws.

See previous post:  The Case of the Pope; From a legal perspective.

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It is sickening to me, to see and hear the pope expressing love for ‘God’s children’ while allowing their  torture and rape to continue.  I use the word ‘allowing’ deliberately, because that is what the present Pope is doing, and what his predecessors have done;  the Vatican’s secrecy and  inaction have ensured the abuse continues.  The scandals that first emerged in Canada and Australia in the 1980s, followed by Ireland in the 1990s, the United States this decade and, in recent months, Benedict’s German homeland, are but the tip of the iceberg.  And no-one has even begun to examine accusations coming out of Africa where many paedophile priests are sent for their protection from Western countries’ legal systems.

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Comments regarding the Pope’s letter and the Cloyne Report:

Maeve Lewis, head of  ONE IN FOUR victims’ group, stated that the Pope “passed up a glorious opportunity to address the core issue in the scandal; the deliberate policy of the Catholic Church, at the highest levels, to protect sex offenders, thereby endangering children”.

“The Pope speaks only of failures in the Irish church and neglects the role of the Vatican. If the church cannot acknowledge this fundamental truth, it is still in denial”.  She said she was “astounded” at the Pope’s previous assertion that  ‘the roots of clerical sexual abuse lie in the secularization of Irish society, the falling off of religious devotion, and failures to adhere to canon law.’ “This shows a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics of sexual violence and creates little hope that the church will ever respond effectively to the problem.”

Author and survivor Andrew Madden said issues highlighted by him and others in a letter to the Pope had been ignored.  He said there had been no responsibility taken by the Catholic Church, regarding the sexual abuse of so many children, and its protection  of paedophile priests.   Mr Madden  goes on to say that Pope Benedict has repeated his apology for the hurt caused to those abused but then states that the Church’s only  role has been its failure to ‘deal with criminal and sinful acts’.  According to Mr Madden, the Catholic Church didn’t fail to act; it acted very clearly to protect itself and left the abused children to fend for themselves.

Another survivor, Marie Collins said she welcomed the order that church leaders should co-operate with police, but she said there had been no mention of the Vatican’s role in the cover-ups which allowed the abuse to continue.  [In fact it is not an 'order' but a 'guideline'].

Alan Shatter, Justice Minister in the Irish parliament also lashed out at the Pope, saying:  “We should never again tolerate a foreign state issuing directives to members of the hierarchy and other clerics in this state to violate Irish law by concealing reports of child sexual abuse and not reporting such allegations. Nor should we ever again tolerate a foreign state requiring that an oath of any nature be taken by an adult or child to maintain a veil of secrecy over incidents of sexual abuse.”

The latter was a reference to a case involving current Cardinal Sean Brady, who in 1975 swore two young children to an oath not to reveal their abuse.

The Cloyne report into Catholic clerical child abuse in Ireland released on Wednesday 20^th July, will identify 19 Catholic priests who allegedly sexually assaulted children in the 1990s. The report into abuse allegations in the Catholic diocese of Cloyne, has been approved for publication by the Irish government.

The report, known officially as the Commission of Investigation Report into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, will be published by Ireland’s minister for justice, Alan Shatter, and the minister for children, Frances Fitzgerald.

The last Irish government agreed to extend the Murphy commission’s remit to include Cloyne, as well as the Dublin archdiocese. The commission’s Dublin report found widespread clerical abuse and cover-up in the Irish capital which was devastating for the Catholic Church. It also found child protection practices in the Dublin diocese to be ‘inadequate and in some respects dangerous’.

The commission was later asked to investigate the handling of sex abuse allegations in Cloyne by church and state authorities between 1 January 1996 – when the church’s first-published guidelines, its Framework Document, came into play – and 1 February 2009.

Minister Alan Shatter said the report’s findings were unambiguous. “We cannot correct past wrongs perpetrated on our children, but we can take action to prevent, insofar as is possible, the wrongs of the past being perpetrated on our children in the future,” he said.  “We cannot depend on the undertakings of others to correct failings and introduce robust and effective structures of protection. The Cloyne Report  irrefutably confirms that some who, in the past, gave such undertakings, acted in bad faith,” the Minister told Parliament.

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has launched an unprecedented attack on the Catholic Church,  saying the relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again following the Cloyne report. The Vatican chose to focus on the interests of the Church rather than the children abused by its clergy and shielded by its leaders.

The Catholic News Service reports Mr Kenny accused the Vatican of adopting a “calculated, withering position” on abuse.   He said that “the Irish people, including the very many faithful Catholics who – like me – have been shocked and dismayed by the repeated failings of Church authorities to face up to what is required; deserve and require confirmation from the Vatican that they do accept, endorse and require compliance by all Church authorities herewith, the obligations to report all cases of suspected abuse, whether current or historical, to the state’s authorities.”

“The revelations of the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic . . . as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism . . . the narcissism . . . that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”

PM Kenny said the Cloyne report told “a tale of a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children”. He said although the report had shown the need for the Vatican “to get its house in order”, it also revealed how the State had failed victims too.  “For too long Ireland has neglected its children,” he said.  “This is not Rome. This is the Republic of Ireland 2011, a republic of laws,” Mr Kenny said.

The Prime Minister was speaking during a Government motion on the report that “deplores the Vatican’s intervention which contributed to the undermining of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish bishops”. It expresses “dismay at the disturbing findings of the report and at the inadequate and inappropriate response, particularly of the Church authorities in Cloyne, to complaints and allegations of child sexual abuse.”

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Italy, another predominantly Catholic country, has a similar tale to tell.

See Post:  Paedophilia in Italy

Most recent post: 

Clerical Paedophilia; Centuries Old Time Bomb

Stabilise the World’s Population & Reduce Pollution

“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principal ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children to have, the spacing of the children. You have to lift child-survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families. And most important, you have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices”.  -Al Gore.     Sourced from Grist.org

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Women of our grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ generations gave birth to many children.  For instance, in my family history, my Italian paternal great-grandmother gave birth to thirteen children, and my Lebanese grandmother, twelve children.  Many women died in childbirth and the ones that didn’t die that way, died from self-inflicted abortions, or sheer exhaustion.  Young girls in these large families were like little slaves helping to cook and clean, and look after the steady stream of siblings.  This prepared them well for their own marriages where the whole cycle would be repeated again and again.

So many children and babies died, that women felt the need to have large families.  The important point here, is that there was no safe and reliable contraception, so women could not space the births of their children.  Women’s role in historical and ancient societies was to produce many offspring and be sexually available to their husbands.  Pagan societies valued  fertility and the mother goddess.  In Christian societies you had the choice of becoming a nun or marrying and producing many children.  The Catholic Church still bans contraception and while modern wealthy Catholic societies ignore this ban, in many poor Catholic countries  women continue to have very large families.

The majority of women in patriarchal societies have very few choices available to them. In those societies where women  are uneducated and have no power over their own lives, or their children’s lives, the women rely on their husbands for everything from food and shelter, to protection. Most do not have the means to an education to enable them to better themselves and so  rise above the poverty they live in.

In societies where women are empowered and educated, and they have access to contraception, the whole family unit benefits, and in turn, the wider society.  The mother is healthier, and she has more energy to devote to her smaller family.  This can only benefit humanity and the planet we live on.

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Christians valued a large family as a gift from God. From Olwen Hufton’s “The Prospect Before Her’

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There are too many human beings on this planet using up the earth’s resources, and too little biodiversity, which scientists tell us is diminishing by the day.  Cutting down on pollution is a good start, but we must also curtail the growing global human population.  As in nurturing a healthy body and mind in a holistic approach, so we must look to caring for the planet we live on by conserving all resources and that means having fewer children while giving each child a chance to develop to his or her full potential.

President Benigno Aquino III Is A Hero

Philippines’ President Benigno Aquino III, still widely popular, is supporting artificial birth control even if it means risking excommunication from the dominant Roman Catholic church.  But beware, Mr Aquino, the opposition is out to get you so don’t follow in the footsteps of other disgraced male political leaders.  You are not smear proof and your country needs you.

The wide-ranging and acrimonious debate over government-funded access to contraceptives in the Philippines has entered the country’s Congress.   The issue is creating deeper rifts between the powerful and conservative Catholic establishment, which says contraceptives are as sinful as abortions,  and reformers, who want more openness about condoms and other birth control in the impoverished Southeast Asian nation to slow population growth and help prevent disease.

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Pope says NO

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The Reproductive Health Bill introduced  into the House of Representatives would require the government to provide information on family planning methods, make contraceptives available free of charge and introduce reproductive health and sexuality classes in schools.  Perfectly reasonable and sensible I would have thought.

Supporters believe the measures will slow the Philippines’ rapid population growth that surely contributes to the country’s crushing poverty.  Influential bishops [surprise!] have blocked family planning bills in the past by arguing that they would erode moral values, encourage promiscuity and early pregnancies.   But would they prevent child sex abuse by paedophile priests, I wonder?

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See   Female Sex Workers Recognised By The Pope

&   Catholic Condom Confusion

The Vatican Advises On Sexual Abuse

The Vatican has advised bishops around the world  of the importance of co-operating with police if complaints have been laid about specific priests raping and molesting children. Bishops were asked to develop guidelines for preventing sex abuse by May 2012.

How can Bishops prevent sex abuse by following ‘guidelines’ unless the priest under suspicion is reported to police immediately and is barred from performing official duties while under investigation?  Neither of these necessary actions have been insisted on by the Vatican.

The communique from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly Office of the Holy Inquisition) made no provision to ensure the bishops actually follow any guidelines, and victims groups immediately denounced the recommendations as “dangerously flawed” because they stress the exclusive authority of bishops to determine the credibility of abuse allegations.  And we all know where that has led.  It seems that this is another release from the Pope to lull the faithful into a false sense of security regarding their children in the hands of priests, while nothing has changed!

“There’s nothing that will make a child safer today or tomorrow or next month or next year,” said Barbara Dorris, outreach director for the main U.S. victims group Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests.

The sexual abuse of children continues:

The communique is being issued at a time when the sex abuse guidelines of the U.S. bishops have been put into question after a Philadelphia grand jury earlier this year indicted a high-ranking church official on child endangerment charges for allegedly transferring predator priests. Four co-defendants — two priests, an ex-priest and a former Catholic school teacher — are charged with raping children.

The grand jury found “substantial evidence of abuse” committed by at least 37 other priests who remained in active ministry at the time of the report. Philadelphia’s archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, initially insisted that no archdiocesan priests in ministry had an “admitted or established allegation” against them. But he later suspended two dozen of the 37 priests. The archdiocese says many of the 37 were accused not of actual molestation but of so-called “boundary issues,” including inappropriate touching or sharing porn with minors — the latter a canonical crime in and of itself.  These are mere “boundary issues”??

How about this for a pathetic excuse: It was explained by a spokesman that the Vatican didn’t make reporting abuse cases to police mandatory because different countries have different laws which bishops must abide by. The Vatican states such a binding  rule would be problematic for priests working in countries with repressive regimes.  Who would the leaders of repressive regimes be more harmful to, the abusive priests or the abused children?

If this is the Vatican’s idea of a ‘transparency drive’, perhaps the Vatican hierarchy needs to look up the meaning of transparency in the dictionary, that’s if they possess one.  The newly published guidelines also outline the different ways that abusive priests can be disciplined by the church’s internal courts [my emphasis]. In “very grave cases”, (aren’t they all grave?) the pope may issue a decree dismissing a priest from the clerical state.   You mean the ‘E’ word?  But this has never yet happened, has it?

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The Vatican Speaks

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The following statement has to be the most idiotic the Vatican has ever released in relation to paedophile priests:

The pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone risked new controversy by claiming that paedophilia was linked to homosexuality. “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia,” he told a news conference in Santiago.   Can we please have the names of these many psychiatric experts, and are they all Catholic?  What about the thousands of ‘celibate’ priests who have raped hundreds of thousands of girls and boys?  Still more questions than answers.

Perhaps The Church’s fantastical teachings has made it easy for priests to delude themselves into believing that they weren’t really having sex with their victims.  It was women, those evil temptresses they had to avoid, as I write in  Catholic Dichotomy of Females.  I cannot believe that the problem is solely down to paedophilia or homosexuality.  It is much more psychologically complicated than that.

More…Vatican, Is It The Gay Men’s Club?

&   Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

&    Paedophilia In Italy

&    Kiss Of Betrayal

Unification of Italy Anniversary – Risorgimento!

Jasper Ridley’s Garibaldi & the history of Risorgimento

Pope Benedict XVI has the audacity to say that  Catholics made a fundamental contribution to creating a united Italy and a national identity, in a message marking the country’s 150th birthday.  Benedict says Christianity helped forge a national identity that resisted political fragmentation on the Italian peninsula,  and foreign domination.  He says the church’s contribution came through education, literature and the arts in general, listing such personalities as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Bernini, whose works were often commissioned for religious purposes.  Is the pope trying to publicise a dwindling Christianity in this age of free thinking and science?

Benedict is speaking utter BS.  Artists were stymied and never allowed to paint what they pleased in case it offended the Catholic Church.  Many artists lived a life of subsistence because of this and it is well documented how the Catholic clergy, including extremely wealthy popes and cardinals,  enforced their sexual proclivities on young artists.  The 19th Century Pope did all he could to quash any attempts at the unification of Italy.  It would mean that the papal states would shrink to the City of Rome and finally to Vatican City.  Giusseppe Garibaldi led the Risorgimento;  he and his followers hated the Catholic Church (Papal Rome) because so often they were betrayed by nuns, priests and cardinals.  It was Garibaldi and those politicians who supported his quest for unification, who finally forced Austria, papal sycophants, and France, out of Italy.  Garibaldi’s heartbreak was that Nice, his birthplace,  was ceded to France in 1861 by politicians, as part of the deal that they leave the peninsula.

It is such a joke that this pope could come out and say it was through Catholic education and literature that Italy was united.  The truth is, only ‘the list’ of books approved by the Church were available for the general populace to read.  Most literature that made its way to Italy was burned or hidden in heavily fortified libraries only accessible to Monks and Cardinals.  See previous post Vatican Library.   As for resisting political fragmentation; the only reason they exiled or brutalised any political opposition was because the Church did not want to lose the corrupted power base they possessed.   The Church was fully funded and supported by the Spanish, French and Austrians.

If any group can be held responsible for seeding the Risorgimento (resurgence) it was the people of Italy themselves; mostly peasant farmers, some elitists, and mercenaries who fought with Garibaldi in South America.  Peasant farmers, led by Garibaldi, almost singlehandedly drove foreign power out of Sicily, and this was the catalyst that began the unstoppable unification of the peninsula.  The Roman Catholic Church opposed unification simply because it would mean the end of the vice grip they held over Italy.  Read Garibaldi by Jasper Ridley, it is very enlightening and I would hazard a guess that it is not one of the Vatican’s favourite books.

See Pino Aprile’s book about Southern Italy

Vatican – Is It The Gay Men’s Club?

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The cover of Panorama: “The Wild Nights Of Gay Priests”.

Is it any wonder that the Vatican, in light of its failure to immediately report sexual abuse by Catholic clergy to criminal investigators, is known as ‘The Gay Men’s Club?
Apparently, Cardinal Sean O’Malley has a list of suspected paedophile priests in Boston which he refuses to release. The unreleased list, possibly 40 names of  offending priests, is included in a record of the minutes from a March 2010 meeting of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council.How can the Vatican  therefore, allow these men to continue working around vulnerable children in  positions of trust?   It also means these men are not receiving help for their predilections.

Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, called the number of undisclosed priests “staggering.” She accused O’Malley of purposely delaying to protect church officials responsible for monitoring the priests.  And also, if past actions by Bishops are anything to go by, so the accused can be sent on safely to another parish in Africa somewhere.  The church has said compiling the list is a complex task. It cited concerns about due process for accused priests.  What I would like to know is:  what about the children?

Many gay priests have been exposed by Panorama magazine frequenting gay clubs and actually having sex with gay partners.  Being gay is not the issue here.  It is the hypocrisy of supposed men of God, claiming they are celibate.  If there is so much opportunity around for gay sex, one has to wonder why these men have joined the priesthood.  It may be that the Catholic religion allows them to believe that if they are not having sex with women, then they are not having sex.  Perhaps it is as simple or as psychologically complicated as that.

Panorama magazine is owned by Catholic Prime Minister and media baron, Silvio Berlusconi.  Its reporters have film of priests attending gay clubs and having gay sex.  One of the priests  is later filmed saying Mass!  http://italia.panorama.it/Le-notti-brave-dei-preti-gay  – can be translated into English via Google

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See previous posts:

Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

Last Judgment and Babies

Paedophilia in Italy

Kiss of Betrayal

I Survived a Christchurch Earthquake

Heritage listed Catholic Church in Christchurch (Getty Images)

Manchester Street-one of the worst hit  (Getty Images)

Published in The Australian Writer issue #374 February 2012

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I was living in Melbourne when the Christchurch earthquake struck on 4 September 2010. My daughter Gina, her husband and baby son, were living there the time.

The first I knew about the September quake (without realising it at the time!), was when my daughter sent me a text:  “We are under the table, and Jack thinks it’s great fun”.  After getting out of bed at around 4 am to search for my bleeping mobile, only to find this message from Gina, I promptly turned the thing off, muttering “I will have to have words with that girl about the  time difference”, and staggered my way back to bed.  When the news automatically came on our bedside radio clock at 6am  announcing the 7.1 magnitude earthquake in  Christchurch, I leapt out of bed, wide awake, the full realization hitting me.  I had gone back to sleep ignoring my daughter’s text.  I was used to Gina texting at all hours of the morning after Jack was born, mostly to tell me how gorgeous he was, but often to ask advice about his sleeping and feeding routines.

Panicking, I managed to get through to her and calmed down when I heard she and her family were okay and that their house sustained no damage. At that stage, no-one in Christchurch had died as a result of the quake and damage to buildings was minimal.

However, I was in Christchurch when a devastating earthquake hit five months later on 22 February 2011; Gina and her husband, Paul, were not. They were off to an education conference in Rotorua and I was there to look after Jack,  a 20 month old with attitude.  On Monday the 21st, Gina and I had spent the day with Jack shopping in the CBD, having coffees and snacks at cafés, and generally having a wonderful mother/daughter day out.

On Tuesday the 22nd, Paul and Gina left me with Jack early morning to catch their flight to Rotorua.  At 9.30am I left the house to take Jack to his usual private day care.  Gina works Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and we decided it was better for Jack if we kept to his routines while his parents were away.  I was a little nervous when they left, because I recalled that the last time they had arranged for me to come over from Melbourne to look after Jack for a week, Paul snapped his Achilles tendon and their trip away was cancelled.  I wondered what my little charge had in store this time to get his parents back.

After dropping Jack off, I did a few messages  and returned to the house in Avonhead to settle down, while Jack was away,  to some serious writing on my laptop for my next book.  Deep in thought, re-reading what I had just written, I felt more than heard, a loud rumble and then the whole house heaved, seemingly all over the place. I leapt up and raced to the nearest door frame with double french doors dividing the dining room and lounge.  I gripped onto the door jamb to stop myself falling as the glass doors swung back and forth on their hinges.  The quake went on for many seconds and slowly settled into faint tremors.  I immediately sent Gina a text “earthquake, all ok”.  That was the last communication with her until that evening, and I learned later how important that simple message was to her, as she could not contact anyone in Christchurch for some time.

Not knowing of the hell that engulfed the CBD, I raced for the car in the driveway, my only thought to get to Jack.  Before I left, I had tried ringing the carer on the landline and mobile, but neither worked.  Ten minutes driving on almost-empty roads, got me to my destination and I arrived to find the carer and her charges under the substantial dining table, watching cartoons on a tiny laptop.  Jack was serene, as though it was perfectly normal to sit under the table.  I joined them.

In between the aftershocks, I got up to watch the horrors unfolding on TV in the adjoining lounge.  The earthquake was of a lesser magnitude than the one in September;  6.3, but shallower at 5 metres, and centred at Lyttelton.  Much of the CBD, where Gina, Jack and I had spent most of the day before, was all but razed.  Gina told me later that as the news got through to her and her colleagues, all Christchurch residents at the conference just wanted to get home to family and friends.  But there were no flights to Christchurch that  day.  All control towers and runways had to be inspected.  Back at the house in Avonhead, after spending an hour and half drinking comforting tea at the carer’s, I speedily carried Jack from the car  into the dining room, closed all the doors and removed the chairs from around the dining table, to enable us fast access under the table.  I gathered nappies, toys, books and anything else I needed for our enclosed space.  I had no electricity and no phones, and no battery radio.  That was the worst time, because I felt so isolated.  I managed to find enough food for Jack and I that didn’t need cooking. I took Jack  to bed at about 7 pm after playing with him and reading him stories, in between grabbing him and diving under the table during each aftershock tremor.  Singing Jack’s favourite songs had him swaying and laughing.

Down in Jack’s bedroom, I dressed him in his pyjamas and lifted him into his cot.  I dragged the single bed in his room over beside the cot and lay with my hand through the bars, holding his little hand.  Jack thought this was great fun and fell asleep without a murmur.  Tremors kept me awake most of the night so I was  in a state of  ‘fright and flight’  while Jack slept on.  The next morning Gina managed to get through to speak to me on  my mobile, relieved to hear we had made it safely from the carer’s home and that the house was undamaged.  They were hoping to board a flight late that morning to come home.  In the meantime, she told me that all drinking water had to be boiled and not to flush the toilets because raw sewerage was flowing into the estuary and it was probably seeping into the city’s water supply.  The best news of all was that there was a transistor radio and torch I could use, on a top shelf in the pantry, put there for just such emergencies.  Also, there were several bottles of drinking water in the deep freeze.  I told her that although there were few cars on the road when I went to pick up Jack, on the way back, cars were bumper to bumper going in the opposite direction, probably frantic drivers travelling to loved ones and picking children up from their schools.  Many schools were badly damaged in the quake, but no children were injured or killed.

Meanwhile, still holed up in the dining room, waiting to hear from Gina, I received another text message saying that they were on their way to Christchurch, when a man on the plane, worried about family he could not contact, had a heart attack, and the plane had to return to Rotorua.  Gina and Paul finally arrived back at their home at 4pm on Wednesday, relieved we and the house were fine, but distraught at news that many colleagues had lost their homes and some acquaintances were missing or dead in the rubble of the city.

The next day we travelled to Cromwell in Central Otago, five hours drive away, to Paul’s family’s holiday house.  We were lucky to be able to escape the city, but we were all on edge, thinking of what was happening back home.  After eight days, we returned to Christchurch and the growing total of the dead pulled from rubble.  There was no peace to be had and the after shocks reminded us of the ruin of one of New Zealand’s most picturesque cities.  Over 10,000 homes cannot be rebuilt because of the liquefaction of the land under them.  The violent tremors liquefied the land pushing  the sandy-silt  up through roads and  buildings.  Many families whose homes were destroyed, are living in caravans, cars, halls and tents.  Many have left the city.

Post earthquake, the fanatics and soothsayers had their say in letters to newspaper editors  and on radio talkback.  Apparently God destroyed Manchester Street because it is alive with prostitutes at night.  One has to ask why God would destroy the rest of the city as well, trapping people at work in multi-storied buildings, and flattening countless family homes.  Then there are the churches.  Why did God turn  Christchurch Cathedral,  Baptist churches, Anglican churches,  Catholic churches, Protestant churches, to name a few, into piles of rubble?   Is it possible that the earth moved because of a fault line in the earth’s crust?  I prefer that scientific explanation myself.

Christchurch CBD 22 February 2011 (Getty Images)