The common factor in those cases of child abuse - and let us not confuse homosexuality with paedophilia here - is that the abuser was almost always in a position of authority over the abused - as a teacher, priest, father, uncle, or treasured family friend - and that the child was often not believed when the first accusations were made.
Yes, prosecutions were rare, and convictions were rarer still, but this is because most children couldn't face the highly adversarial system of justice we have here - so much so, that many described the experience of going to court as akin to being raped a second time.
It is estimated that less than one in a hundred cases of abuse resulted in a successful prosecution, and that was not just because of the reluctance of the courts to find against highly respected and esteemed members of society, but the odds of proving a case were simply stacked against the victims.
It is only latterly - with DNA testing, that it has become more possible to establish forensic standards of proof acceptable to the courts in a higher proportion of cases. However I have direct experience of a perpetrator getting off scott free because of his Lawyer's success in intimidating the victim and potential witnesses.
And in all her years of working with both abused and abusers, my wife very very rarely came across a false allegation. Often the motivation for prosecution was not revenge or financial compensation, but a simple desire for recognition of the wrong committed, an apology, and an assurance that the perpetrator will not be able to re-offend.
Yes, there is nothing more horrible for someone falsely accused. But family law cases involving minors are held in camera and the offender cannot be named unless a prosecution is successful - and sometimes not even then if it would assist in the identification fo the victim.
So I am afraid you are in danger of falling for the alternative institutional defence narrative, that Priests were no worse than the general population, ("a few bad apples"),that the Church had to protect their priests against false accusations, and that many of the allegations were dubious at best.
The reality, in Ireland, at least, is that Paedophiles tended to gravitate towards positions of authority were they could have trusted contact with children, the opportunity to groom them, and the means of silencing them. The role of Priest in traditional Irish society was ideal for this, and there have been virtually no allegations against priests of non-catholic denominations.
Whether this can be proved to be statistically significant given their smaller number, I don't know, but we should also consider that a Priest in a non-catholic denominations tended to have a much less authoritarian role, was much less embedded in the Civil society power structures of the state, and was much less the object of uncritical obedience and veneration.
But where I really take issue with your narrative is the suggestion that the Catholic Church shouldn't be subjected to a higher standard of judgement than your average criminal or family member paedophile. Of course there were paedophiles outside the Church. But they were not held up to be the vicars of Christ and God's representatives on earth. Of course there was abuse in secular institutions. But the Catholic Church basically ran the show when it came to schools, hospitals, orphanages etc. and it demanded obedience, deference and severely punished those who failed to conform. It was an enforced order which facilitated the abuse of authority to abuse children and where children's voices were not heard.
I would also contest your apparent belief that there is nothing inherent in catholic theology and canon law which resulted in a higher incidence of abuse - men forced to be celibate from 14,sexual repression, extreme emotional immaturity, a culture of absolute and uncritical obedience, widespread extreme physical cruelty, fascist political beliefs, the subjugation of women, and extreme authoritarianism.
But that is not an argument that is widely made in the media and to bring it up here as part of your narrative is a bit of a straw man. Virtually none of the campaigners for justice for victims of clerical abuse are anti-catholic as such, and some are quite devout in their beliefs. Their outrage is at seeing their church betrayed.
And as others have pointed out here, it is not just the crime of child abuse itself, but the widespread and systematic abuse and cover-up at the highest level which ensued. The Murphy report covered a sample of several hundred cases in just one dioceses. The Church knew about most of those allegations - many of those reports went to Rome - and the response was always the same. Enforce silence on pain of excommunication. Move the priest on to avoid scandal. protect the institution at all costs.
And oh yes, the other common factor: virtually no concern for the welfare of the victims themselves.
If the Church is now held to a higher standard it is because the Gospel it preaches holds it to a higher standard. But frankly, it matters little what standard is applied. It has failed at the level of the most basic human standards of decency and justice. The full rigours of the law should be applied without fear or favour. By all means hold cases in camera where irreparable damage might be done to the innocent. But let;s stop making excuses for the most disgusting betrayal of trust known to humankind - done in the name of a God who "suffered the little children..." notes from no w here
However, you immediately break into a disclaimer of "Things are different here in Ireland," forgetting, apparently, that the sexual abuse scandals also were a big deal beforehand in the US, Latin America, and now have moved to the Continent as well, all following the same storyline. So, this isn't an Irish thing at all. It is one of two things: 1) Either there is, in fact, a global Catholic Church problem of an institutional conspiracy to protect sexual abusers, or 2) It's a re-wording of the classic elite hate narrative used in political discourse for centuries, often resulting in murder and massacre (for example, Spain and Mexico in the 20th century regarding Catholic clergy, but also the Holocaust of European Jews).
Take this, for example:
Do you have any evidence for this, in Ireland or elsewhere? Because that isn't just an Irish argument you've made -- that's the typical, dinner-party reasoning made about paedofiles, care-giving professionals, and the Catholic Church anywhere. I suggest that it's based much more on an often-heard but entirely unschooled story about what motivates sexual abusers than on any actual empirical evidence, but I'm open to seeing the evidence on it, particulary in Ireland.
True, but that's why you have to do a comparison between Catholic institutions and non-Catholic ones in some fair way (even if complicated by the fact that the Catholic Church predominates in such professions in Ireland -- a comparison with Northern Ireland's experience, for example. However, your underlying point is that prosecutions are usually not successful because the system is stacked against the accuser. Also, possible, but that is only true if accusers are, in fact, usually telling the truth, and I don't think you can provide evidence that this is so, with all due respect to your wife. (Not a single false claim? (?!) Okay, but I have a lot of family members and friends in the social working profession too, a jaded bunch indeed, and that's not what even the church hating zealots among them say.)
My argument doesn't rest on numbers of successful prosecutions. Just data on numbers of accusations made and court cases filed is sufficient. It is possible that if the Church has a monopoly on education and child care in Ireland that it would complicate such evidence, but this isn't just an Irish issue, so data is available from the US and elsewhere. And if it is an Irish issue, than it shouldn't be part of the narrative going on in Germany, Holland, and elsewhere right now.
And maybe the alleged perpetrator was innocent too, and his lawyer did the right thing. It's you own experience, so I'll trust your judgement, but children lie, a lot and for lots of different reasons, and you'll find that the field of forensic psychiatry generally now accepts that the vast majority of child sexual abuse allegations are simply false, often with the child being forced by other adults to make accusations. (Source: a friend of mine -- I'm pretty invested personally in preventing child sexual abuse, for other personal reasons.)
Finally, no where do I argue that Church officials, even up to the Primate of Ireland where it can be shown that deliberate oversight or attempt to cover up a solid allegation occurred, should not be held accountable. I've said exactly the opposite -- I think he should resign, given the evidence of that case in the public domain so far. However, these tragic cases should not become ammunition for one's other personal grievances with the Catholic Church, because there is no honest connection between them, despite frequent unwarranted claims to the contrary in the common narratives of these events. When these unestablished connections are introduced, for example in the manner in which ThatBritGuy introduced them in his comments, an essay on a grave injustice perpetrated by people in power over innocent victims gets reduced to a lazy hate narrative about a perverted/elite Catholic clergy. It's dishonest, and it's dangerous.
Secondly, as I said, Ireland is a poor example to take if you are trying to prove or disprove the notion that paedophilia was more prevalent in Catholic rather than secular or Protestant contexts because of the relative sizes of the samples involved, but I note you ignore my comment that I know of no allegations against a protestant priest, for example, even though you would expect at least some allegations if only on a purely random basis based on the statistical prevalence of paedophilia and incest in family relationships.
Thirdly, the fact that I know of no statistical analyses on the prevalence of paedophilia in different types of institutions or relationships - without having done a search for same - speaks more to the fact that this is not a research interest of mine, largely because I know of no one in Ireland who would dispute such a connection between a particularly authoritarian and repressive form of Catholicism and the widely reported instances of abuse. Hopefully some such research has or is being done, and I will be more than happy to concede your point if it shows that there is no greater statistical prevalence of abuse in Catholic institutions. (Whether any funding could be obtained for such research is a different matter which I won't go in to here).
Fourthly, I have no particular personal interest in either crediting or discrediting Catholicism per se: It is abusive relationships facilitated by extreme authoritarian structures and a lack of respect for the rights of children that I have a problem with and this can and does occur in all sorts of religious and non-religious contexts. Reforming such institutions so that the rights of children are respected, introducing mandatory reporting, better standards of investigation, and better therapeutic follow up for victims are my main concern. If the Catholic Church in Ireland can be reformed so that these standard are in place, then I will have no problem with it. However the reality at the moment is that the institutional Church is disintegrating before our eyes and may soon become irrelevant to any future debate as it will have no further significant role in the lives of our children. This is the cost it is paying for not reforming itself sooner. Perhaps it has the diehards who mounted the corporate defences you reiterated to thank for this as they refused to acknowledge there was a problem and put it all down to an anti-catholic conspiracy.
Fifthly, regardless of the relative incidence of child abuse in Catholic versus non-Catholic institutions, the very centralised nature of power in the Catholic Church worldwide has ensured that there was a consistent worldwide approach to dealing with such allegations. Papal documents enforced secrecy and non-cooperation with civil authorities. Cases were fought tooth and nail almost regardless of their intrinsic merits. (You can congratulate your friends for the success of their strategy in reducing actual court judgements in favour of secret out of court settlements). No effort was spared to maximise the further trauma of victims due to difficult and long drawn out proceedings. Very little help was given to victims who never sought redress through the law in the first place. Read the Murphy report if you don't believe me.
Finally the narrative you support is all about protecting the institutional church and says nothing about acknowledging and helping the actual victims. It is this, more than anything, which is destroying the Church in Ireland at any rate. If that is your strategy, then so be it. You won't get much support from most Catholics in Ireland (or Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin for that matter). His predecessor, Cardinal Connell, threatened to take him to court in an effort to prevent him from releasing relevant files to the police.
The bottom line: Your battle is not mine. I have no interest in conspiracy theories for or against the Catholic Church except insofar as they impact on the safety and welfare of children. Adults can make their own choices as to which church, what kind of church, or no church they wish to belong to. I believe the cover-up did far more damage to the Church than the actual abuse itself. People accept that there will be instances of abuse and it is all about how those are handled. People who try to discredit those who are committed to child welfare as just being engaged in some kind of hate speech or anti-catholic conspiracy do their own Church a grave injustice, in my view. Most Catholics I know are much better than that, and I wish them all the best. Right now they are leaving their Church in droves but many would no doubt return if they felt there were genuine attempts at reform. But for so long as the powers that be put all criticism down to anti-catholic conspiracies, no real reform is possible, and the decline will continue.
BTW in a very clever piece of political/legal manoeuvring your friends would no doubt approve - a previous Government indemnified the Catholic Church against all damages (estimated in Billions) in return for some property which may turn out to be worth very little indeed. So the Church doesn't even need to take a hard line on defending cases. All taxpayers, Catholic or no, will end up paying. Far be it for me to suggest that it might have been a conspiracy between a devout Catholic minister and Church authorities to get that through the Cabinet before before the true scale of abuse as later revealed in Church files was known to the rest of the Ministers. A protestant run school, which was sued for millions because a swimming coach employed by a separate swimming club which rented the school pool abused swimmers on their premises was not helped by the state in any way. The school itself was not found to be at fault but was liable in full because the swimming club had no assets and the Irish Amateur Swimming Association - the Governing Body - was wound up. (And reconstituted as a separate legal entity soon afterwards). If there are conspiracies in Ireland, it would be hard to make the case that they are anti-catholic. notes from no w here
You wrote a good story about someone who is now a Cardinal and who in the past actually made some kids swear an oath not to tell anyone about their complaints of sexual abuse. That's a stand-alone scandal that serves your argument that he should resign - an argument I endorse wholeheartedly, as I said in my comment. It also serves your argument for institutional changes to protect kids in the future against institutional biases to protect employees that apparently are problematic Ireland. I endorse that argument as well.
However, the comments your essay elicited from others here, and a few narrative elements within it, provide a reason for a mild warning on hate narratives. Namely, it is important, for honesty's sake, to qualify the Catholicism part of the flawed institutional identity at issue, or else to offer solid evidence that makes Catholicism or clergy membership integral to the argument of institutional abuse of power. (You offer an op-ed piece, not factual evidence that warrants any claims.) If you don't, you run the risk of generating, particularly on this issue, knee-jerk class-association responses like ThatBritGuy's, which assert that Catholicism or being a priest is itself the source of the problem and not individual agents or identifiable, institutional flaws in governance systems. Just like being black is associated with criminal activity.
I had given you the benefit of the doubt based on your diary that you weren't in the same camp as other Catholic bashers who've spoken up, as usual, on this issue, but you responded with repetitions of the same class-association slurs that make up the plot of the standard hate narrative -- non-mainstream sexual commitments, an inherent tendency to abuse power among Catholic clergy , and secrecy within a class of people (Perverts/Illuminati) are the root source of the problem in Ireland -- the same found in in all other countries and throughout history, like it has been for Freemasons, Jews, Templars (Friday the 13th) and other despised elites at different times in history. And it's the same narrative on Catholic priests being served up in popular and policy-making discourse everywhere these days regarding Catholic clergy -- not just Ireland.
And this means we need to put on our critical thinking caps regarding this whole story. What's really the evidence and what are you really arguing for here? Details make all the difference between a lazy diary entry and a de facto hate narrative.
If you want to claim that Catholic or clergy identity is the important independent variable at issue in your story, you've got to back it up with some researched evidence on abuse and cover-ups among non-Catholics for comparison. Just because you haven't heard about it in the news yourself doesn't support your story if you're the one accusing others of very serious offenses by association. A writer has the responsibility of doing the the homework, or else qualifying the shortcomings omitted material in the writing, or just holding one's tongue if honesty is important.
you responded with repetitions of the same class-association slurs that make up the plot of the standard hate narrative -- non-mainstream sexual commitments, an inherent tendency to abuse power among Catholic clergy , and secrecy within a class of people (Perverts/Illuminati) are the root source of the problem in Ireland -- the same found in in all other countries and throughout history, like it has been for Freemasons, Jews, Templars (Friday the 13th) and other despised elites at different times in history. And it's the same narrative on Catholic priests being served up in popular and policy-making discourse everywhere these days regarding Catholic clergy -- not just Ireland.
You're making all of that up. The most I have done is made an argument that extremely cruel, repressive, authoritarian and secretive systems, almost completely concerned with protecting the institution and with little concern for the welfare of children are conducive to endemic child abuse. That is a direct reflection of the conclusions of the Murphy and Ryan reports which not even the Church has disputed.
If you think that authoritarianism, secrecy. perverting the course of justice and obliviousness to the rights and welfare of children are essential tenets of Catholicism then I stand guilty of anti-Catholicism as charged. However all Catholics I know are as embarrassed and outraged by what happened as I am.
The fact is there has been no comparable scale of abuse in non-Catholic institutions even allowing for their smaller scale. It is therefore for you to prove that (at least in Ireland) there was no Catholic dimension to a problem which overwhelmingly manifested itself in Catholic run institutions.
If this feeds into some broader narrative that is not justified elsewhere, then let those who apply that narrative elsewhere justify that. I cannot take responsibility for the fact that a writer (say) in Germany adduces an Irish parallel to an argument s/he is making in a German context.
ThatBritGuy is more than capable of defending himself. However my experience of ET is that most contributors are either indifferent to religion or actively anti-religious, and require rational arguments or facts to support an argument rather than faith or belief. A diary on a religious topic is always going to excite but marginal interest, but I have not detected a particular anti-Catholic bias. All religious sentiment unsupported by facts tends to get pretty short shrift regardless of its denominational origins. notes from no w here
The fact is there has been no comparable scale of abuse in non-Catholic institutions even allowing for their smaller scale.
We just don't know that this is true. Neither you nor anyone else has been able to present compelling evidence on on a very simple clarifying question about your diary -- is this an Irish problem, a social service problem, or a Catholic problem, and what's the evidence? I hope you can see that by not specifying an answer to this question in your piece or responses, you're implicitly arguing that this is primarily a Catholic problem, not an Irish one or a general problem of society or governance. So can you back up that claim with a factual comparison with non-Catholic social service agencies? I'm agnostic on this. I just want to see the evidence.
The answer to this question has no import at all on your central thesis that those who covered up and allowed these tragedies to occur should face some kind of justice and that reforms are also needed. But the answer to this question does clarify an important element about the level of trust I, as a reader of your piece, can have in your thinking as writer. Frankly, if you don't answer or at least clarify your sensitivity to this problem I have to assume you don't even recognize the problem exists and it makes your whole diary suspect.
It is therefore for you to prove that (at least in Ireland) there was no Catholic dimension to a problem which overwhelmingly manifested itself in Catholic run institutions.
No, it is your job of the writer of a diary, not me, the reader, to either clarify or back up or any implied accusations against a class of people with facts and not mere insinuation. I've informed you that your evidence doesn't support an implied thesis that this is a Catholic problem, requiring Catholic reforms, or a different problem requiring different reforms. And comments on your diary seem to have an anti-cleric or anti-Church flavor, justifying my honest questions about your piece.
Obviously you don't agree, but it's your loss as a writer if you choose to be insensitive to such issues and your readers, not mine. I'm challenging you to be a better writer on this topic, take it leave it.
If no one has, then simple honesty and respect for people requires that we clarify that we can't derive any implication about Catholic institutions or clergy as a class from this -- just that we know that a problem definitely exists in at least one major provider of social services, the Catholic Church, and that those problems must be addressed as well as looked into in all other providers of social services.
Really, it reminds me of the health care debate line taken by Boehner, or the climate debate lines taken by the warming deniers.
"Prove it, beyond a reasonable doubt!"
Yeah, right. The threat from the admins in the Church was excommunication for bringing in the secular authorities.
I'm quite willing to the the church versus society in this line of secrecy at all costs. Just makes sense.
So call me a hater. To me, it's fish in the milk. Align culture with our nature.
