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.
