The solution has been to close virtually all the Catholic institutions (except some elite private boarding schools and hospitals), to de-stigmatise illegitimacy and single parenthood and allow single and unmarried parents to retain their children, to de-stigmatise poverty and provide better social welfare and child care benefits and services, to provide better state oversight of private provision of social care services, with mandatory reporting, social care orders for children at risk, multi-disciplinary case conferencing etc. and strengthening legal safeguards for children and greater provision of fostering and adoptions facilities and services.
It's far from perfect and some at risk children fall through the cracks because of inadequate provision largely due to underfunded services or inadequate coordination of services. But we didn't have a choice in any case since the Catholic Church has imploded with almost zero vocations of nuns, brothers and priests. Many existing nuns, brothers and Priests have been laicised, married or left the Church altogether.
There are almost no religious teachers or nurses any more, and the role of the Church is restricted to a management role as they generally hold title to the deeds of the premises even though the services are entirely funded by the state. Even this residual role is gradually ending with a growth of non-denominational schools and hospitals in all sectors.
The argument you make is almost irrelevant in Ireland. The Catholic Church has been all but destroyed by a variety of factors and trends, the most dramatic of which have been the revelations of child abuse. It is withdrawing from public life and engagement in all but the most basic ritual functions - Mass, confirmations, weddings, funerals - and even that much less so.
Virtually nobody would take your conspiracy theories seriously in Ireland. The Church accomplished this state of affairs almost by itself. notes from no w here
Here's how it works:
Asking this question this way, I argue, is the only honest way to address this issue without tainting the argument with social constructions for or against Catholic identity.
There are, of course, more possibilities involving combinations of Catholicism and nationality (as opposed to just Ireland) to consider as well, but the issue is doing it in a way that treats evidence as honestly as possible without making dishonest a priori assumptions about things based only on the dominant social narratives of the day.
Would this approach better protect children when dealing with this issue? Yes, emphatically. Consider that in the past, as recently as the 1970's, the importance and social priority of specifying children's rights was absent from the dominant social narratives and likely contributed to a de-prioritization of accusations of abuse in a way we would find surprising today. Depending primarily on dominant social narratives for arguing policy consistently leads to ignoring pleas for help from the people who don't fit the narratives.
A few years back, I took quite a few counselling courses (most of a degree, in fact), and did volunteer work as a counsellor.
Of the people I met, spoke to and counselled who were open about having been sexually abused in that time, approximately 60% had been raped by Catholic priests. This is not a Catholic country. If priests "only" raped at the rate of the general population, one would expect to find far fewer examples than that.
100% of those raped by priests had had their families bullied into covering it up. 0% had ever taken the matter to the police. Or claimed compensation. As I recall, "They're making it up for the money" was one of the vile slanders tried on at the time.
Cry "statistically insignificant" if you will, but you seem to think that your anecdotes of the biased constitute evidence. This is what I found. And I was not alone in finding it.
The bit that interests me personally a bit more - I do not have the time to do original empirical research - is to attempt to de-construct the differing narratives employed. I would characterise my narrative as broadly structural/functionalist with with a bit of materialism thrown in. What were the structures at work, what role and functions did the various actors play within them, whose interests were being served?
When I recovered from the shock of your original intervention - I had never heard anyone in Ireland argue that it was all an anti-Catholic conspiracy even if some victim advocates were suspected of leftist or securalist agendas - I hypothesised your narrative as being a faith based institutional protection narrative: the real incidence of child abuse was being grossly exaggerated, the church was only doing what other organisations would have done in similar circumstances, there was no evidence of endemic or systematic abuse, the controversy was being hyped by anti-catholic propagandists opposed to Catholicism per se, it even constituted hate speech by catholic haters.
It reminded me of the Holocaust denial narrative, and then, as Jake pointed out, also of attempts by Zionists to portray all opposition to Zionism, or support for Palestinian human rights as anti-semitism similar to what has blighted European (and Christian) discourse regarded Jews in the past. I hypothesised that this was a debate going on in Catholic circles in the US where perhaps the Catholic Church is still a serious player in national and local political and social discourse.
But I don't think you appreciate just how "discredited" that discourse is in Ireland and Europe. Hence the dismissive attitudes of other ETers here. Hence my argument that the Catholic Church is no longer a serious player in public policy formulation in Ireland - except for some residual elite secondary education and primary school management functions - and that even the Bishops themselves no longer seek to make the case you were making. Several have already resigned and more will follow. And the reason is simple: the evidence of endemic abuse in Irish Catholic institutions is massive and unequivocal in countless personal testimonies, official reports, court judgements and admissions from within the Church itself.
Your narrative may still have traction within faith based communities in the US. It feeds into popular conspiracy theories and attempts to portray the state as evil. There may still be a culture war between faith and secular narratives in the US, but that war is largely over in Ireland and large parts of western Europe. In Ireland it is actually devout Catholics who feel most betrayed by their Church. Secularists were either disinterested or anti the Church anyway.
Your narrative seems, to me, to put the Church's short term interests - damage limitation, asset protection - at the risk of destroying its core message in the eyes of its own believers: that the Church represents the Kingdom of God and that ordained Priests are its consecrated and near infallible representatives. The problem for the faith based narrative is that real danger lies within. As such I see it as a flawed narrative which ill serves the interests it is designed to protect. The Church is imploding not, primarily, because of some external secularist, Islamic or Protestant onslaughts, but because it has become dysfunctional where the rest of society has moved on. notes from no w here
My concern comes from this point which you made in a recent comment (I think to Jake):
<blockgroup>The Irish police are notoriously discrete when it come to dealing with people in positions of influence, and the courts still notoriously lenient on offenders. There really was no excuse for not reporting in Ireland. The odds are still stacked against the victim who still does not have independent representation or advice in court unless they can afford private legal fees...</blockgroup>
The problem with this is that, if true, it just validates the argument that the Church was not, or is not, doing anything differently than civil authorities would do. Secrecy and a perhaps overly aggressive presumption of the innocence of an accused caregiver is how the civil state treats abuse claims as well as the Church, according to your statement. And the damning reports on this issue confirm this -- its the Irish police who gave the benefit of the doubt to accused clerics as well as the now-Cardinal Primate of Ireland.
I think you and others here are interpreting my emphasis on this argument as my trying to protect the Church. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've encountered enough ill will among Church officials in my time to feel no vested interest in helping them out of problems of their own making or oversight. What matters most to me is the narrowing of policy reform possibilities that are inherent in a blame-the Church narrative of these events.
Namely, by blaming the Church for protecting the interests of its priests from damages they may personally face if accusations are false (which they often are, even if they often enough are true as well) the narrowing of options for reform gets limited to two possibilities: Give more power to the state, and/or take power away from individuals by reducing their claims to innocence until proven guilty and allowing them to be punished before their guilt has been determined through some fair process. It's straight out of Foucault, sexual deviancy and all -- the tyranny of a rights=based discourse.
Just because we know that the Church has failed does not mean that we should trust the state to do a better job (the principal agent problem is not automatically corrected if the state is given more responsibility than private organizations with more experience, even bad experience, in such work) or that protections of victims rights need to supersede the rights of innocent people who are accused of grave crimes.
That is why it is necessary to seriously and explicitly address, through an empirically compelling argument, that something inherent in the Church is the important causal factor here, and that it's not really something else.
Collusion between Church and state was certainly a problem at some levels, but the state moved on much faster than the church. The problems I was referring to - in latter years - was much more related to the inherent difficulty of proving sexual abuse against a child - if it was some time before it was reported, if there were no witnesses, no forensic evidence, a respected adults word against a childs... etc. a defendents rights are pretty well protected in Ireland, including an extensive free legal aid scheme for defendants (but not for victims).
However in general the states response was entirely different to the church - victims were not sworn to silence, allegations were investigated by the police, files often went to the Director of Public Prosecutions who decided (based on the likely of a successful prosecution) whether a case should go to court. Sentencing in Ireland is hugely more lenient than the US for all offences - Murderers often serve less than 10 years - but there was also a need to educate older judges of the traumatic impact that sexual offences could have on children. Latterly, victim impact statements have become commonplace.
There was an instance in my locality of a local policeman encountering huge hostility for pursuing a case against a local priest - however he did his job and the priest was eventually convicted. Those who thought that the church could do no wrong and that the child must have been fantasising have kept something of a low profile since.
I take your point about a wrong analysis of what went wrong leading to flawed policy recommendations for the future. However with the Church imploding there is no choice but for the state to take over - assisted by some charities subject to state regulation.
In another context I would also be very critical of the state response - social workers working only 9-5, lack of emergency accommodation, children ending up going from one set of foster parents to another in quick succession etc.
It really is incredibly difficult (and expensive) to care for children when their family breaks down. The provision of generous state benefits for single parents has actually led to a huge increase in very young single mothers who cannot care for their children very adequately according to some authorities.
In this regard I would have one last crib against the Catholic Church. Having a child, in my view, is an incredible responsibility which you should only undertake after careful consideration, preparation and planning. Yet the Church discouraged contraception and taught that it was a sin to try to prevent conception. This has led, in my view, to many parents who didn't really want children, have no idea how to care for them, and who go on to neglect or abuse them terribly - with many going on into state or foster care: a very suboptimal solution at best.
So in summary - the Church got very screwed up about sex, and screwed up society in turn. It's going to take a very long time before that baleful legacy is overcome. Better sex and relationship education, less single sex schools, more responsible attitudes to parenthood, state funded training courses for parents, a reduction in alcohol and drug abuse, less deference to authority, but also greater personal responsibility for actions taken. You would think that a Christian ehtic could have a role in this. Sadly the scandals have so besmirched Christianity that the solutions will have to be largely secular for a very long time to come. notes from no w here
Yet the Church discouraged contraception and taught that it was a sin to try to prevent conception. This has led, in my view, to many parents who didn't really want children, have no idea how to care for them, and who go on to neglect or abuse them terribly - with many going on into state or foster care: a very suboptimal solution at best.
Is Catholicism really the contributing factor in too many births among people, Ireland and elsewhere, who can't handle more kids? And if so, why isn't Catholicism a contributing factor in increased marriage rates among such people (going down), decreased divorce rates (up), or any observed reduction in incidences of extramarital sex or adultery, all of which the Catholic Church also provides specific normative direction. It doesn't really make sense that people who ignore Catholic teaching when it comes to extramarital sex all of sudden become devout when it comes to birth control, does it? Or are you suggesting that it's all those irresponsible, albeit humorless, young couples who actually go to Mass every week who are the ones who also can't handle the children they have?
The only narrative we should be following in all of this is to keep a healthy sense of skepticism and critical thinking about what seems like common wisdom.
Is Catholicism really the contributing factor in too many births among people, Ireland and elsewhere, who can't handle more kids?
Hmm - let's see. The Church says that contraception is sinful and evil, and people who use will spend an eternity in utter torment.
So - yes, there's absolutely no reason for the Church to be blamed when people don't use contraception and have large families they can't afford or manage.
Clearly, there couldn't possibly be any connection between cause and effect there.
And, regarding large families, are those really the ones who surrender their children's care to Church or other authorities? Or are they perhaps the kids from smaller, but broken families?
CJO - Abstract - Ideal family size in the Irish Republic
Irish wives have high family size preferences, the overall mean ideal family size being 4.3 children. The Irish data are compared with American and western European; they show that the ideals of wives in Ireland are significantly higher than in these other countries. The concept of ideal family size appears to possess validity in its own right, and is not solely a rationalization of actual fertility experience.
Condoms weren't legal in Ireland until 1978 - 'not legal' meaning you could go to prison for trying to sell them.
I expect you'll say there's no evidence the Church was responsible for this, but - of course - that would be some distance from political reality in Ireland.
In Africa, meanwhile, where there are a million preventable AIDS deaths every year:
BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Pope tells Africa 'condoms wrong'
Pope Benedict XVI, who is making his first papal visit to Africa, has said that handing out condoms is not the answer in the fight against HIV/Aids. The pontiff, who preaches marital fidelity and abstinence, said the practice only increased the problem. "A Christian can never remain silent," he said, after being greeted on arrival in Cameroon by President Paul Biya.
Pope Benedict XVI, who is making his first papal visit to Africa, has said that handing out condoms is not the answer in the fight against HIV/Aids.
The pontiff, who preaches marital fidelity and abstinence, said the practice only increased the problem.
"A Christian can never remain silent," he said, after being greeted on arrival in Cameroon by President Paul Biya.
If people are listening less now to this kind of nonsense, that's an entirely good thing.
Somewhere along the line the Church got it into its head that sex was almost always evil and that it was its job to control it - despite the fact that Christ had very little to say on the topic other than in the context of prostitution.
It was the Church which invented celibacy, condemned extra-marital sex, single mothers and Homosexuality (as late as the middle ages), became a haven for sexual deviancy, opposed contraception and the control of sexually transmitted diseases through protective measures - all in pursuit of some idealised notion that sex was for procreation within lifelong relationships between opposite sexes and was evil under any other circumstances.
Instead of focusing on exploitative relationships like paedophilia, sexual torture and incest it sought to create impossible norms which ended up screwing up itself and the societies within which it was/is located.
And as Ronald Regan might have said "there you go again" and fall into the same trap as the Church and seek to blame sex for everything when it is the perversion of sex by the Church which is the problem. Sex is NOT the problem, it is NOT inherently evil, and for you to blame the human sex drive for all the problems of the Church is so perversely wrong it isn't even funny. notes from no w here
Part of the problem here is that the Church's ability to control sexual behaviour is declining faster than its ability to block access to protection. The former requires nothing more than a general enlightenment of society. The latter requires both a general enlightenment of society and that the holdouts in the existing power structures are purged.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Part of the problem here is that the Church's ability to control sexual behaviour is declining faster than its ability to block access to protection.
It's an empirical question though. In societies with large Catholic populations, is it actually difficult to get access to birth control. Statistics I've seen before on abortion would indicate otherwise. (I think Guttmacher Institute.) In Catholic Latin America, even where abortion is illegal, abortion rates are higher than in many less Catholic countries where it is legal, which means that we have no evidence that access is difficult even if where nominally prohibited. Also, where, in Africa, Ireland, or anywhere, is it difficult to get access to condoms today? This would seem to indicate that the Church's ability to block access to protection is a bit overblown.
it's the cultural problems at large regarding sex that explain the variation in the data, not the Church
What cultural problems at large are you referring to? The Church was THE authority on sexual behaviour in society. The state entirely delegated its Authority on moral matters to the Church even providing in the Constitution that: "Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Article 44.1.2: The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens
The Church thus spoke for and was regarded as the authority regulating the morals of all Catholics whether they were practising or not. The state enacted laws implementing Catholic moral theology such as the prohibition on contraception on all citizens - Protestants and Atheists included.
By you own logic it is not only higher use of birth control and reduced sexual monogamy which are attributable to the reducing influence of the Church, but also the reducing rate of new cases of sexual in secularised child care institutations abuse being reported. notes from no w here
It is certainly true that in Ireland the Church has institutional advantages in contesting power that it doesn't have in most other Western countries, including other predominantly Catholic countries. And that laws reflect such power given the Church. But does actual behavior reflect that power. By your own admission it does not, which means, as marketing researchers learn in school, there is a big difference between what people say and what they do. I argue that causality can only be attributed honestly to what people do, not what they say, and that means that the Church reflects society much more than it leads it, at least as far as sexual behavior or misbehavior is concerned.
By you own logic it is not only higher use of birth control and reduced sexual monogamy which are attributable to the reducing influence of the Church, but also the reducing rate of new cases of sexual in secularised child care institutations abuse being reported.
No, I argue that neither use of birth control, nor sexual monogamy, nor incidences of abuse, can be attributed to the Church, positive or negative. Even the case of Ireland, which is pretty unique even among Catholic countries in the modern era, that's not the Church but the state that chose to solve it's problem of developing policy-making institutions by providing an explicit role for the church to do that. The fact that other equally Catholic societies found other ways of solving institutional problems for contesting power in other ways shows that what you are attributing to the Church is what you should instead be attributing to Irishness. It's Ireland that explains the variation in the data, not Catholicism. (Which argues for changing Irish political institutions to something more secular but not for any advocacy regarding the church in other countries such as the US, Germany, or even Nigeria, for example.)
shows that what you are attributing to the Church is what you should instead be attributing to Irishness
Ah so the Irish are intrinsically more inclined to abuse children and cover it up? Some would regard that as a borderline racist thesis especially as the pattern of abuse and cover-up was so similar in other Catholic countries/institutions.
You appear to regard the RC Church as something of a Deus ex Machina and not the dominant and defining influence on sexual practices (not just opinions) in Ireland. notes from no w here
Instead, it seems that Church teaching on sexual morality might instead be an aggravating factor, instead of a causal factor. Anglo culture is known, I think much more than Catholicism, for its sexually repressive character. Bill Clinton's misdeeds barely raised eyebrows in Catholic France, Brazil, and Argentina, for example. (And, more perversely, although the same abuse scandals in the Church have apparently been occurring in Europe just as in the Anglo world, people are only just getting around to worrying about it now, almost two decades after the story first broke in the US.)
So it also seems plausible that Catholic influence on sexual behavior and the politics around it may have different effects in different societies. And the fact that Anglo culture, due to recent English and American imperial successes, is the dominant one in the world (the Anglo discourse on rights and laws is the default elite discourse in most of the non-Anglo world too), it seems entirely plausible that the cultural contradictions between Catholicism's traditional Roman outlook of law-as-ideals and the Anglo outlook of rule-of-law, or law-as-rules, could be problematic even globally, though whose responsibility it is to change seems unclear.
The Church is unable to remove the needs - they're hardwired - but it doesn't really need to. All it needs to do is make people feel bad about having them and acting on them.
People who feel bad about themselves express that through masochism, or though authoritarian and abusive sadism - which is exactly the kind of acting out we've seen in Ireland, in Germany, in the US, and in Africa.
Sexual morality is not the issue, and never has been. The issue is power through psychological manipulation.
The Church discovered - or rather reinvented - the use of sexual and other ethical double-binds for mass political psychological control. But it was only able to enforce its brand of religious totalitarianism while it had exclusive control over the narrative space.
The fact that monogamy is waning and birth control is increasing are proof that the Church has lost its narrative monopoly - not that it has given it up voluntarily.
People mostly don't understand the distinction between process and content, which is why 'religious' leaders find manipulation so straightforward.
The Church lost its hold in the West because it was pushed out by competing narratives, not because the processes it used to try to legitimise its narratives were ever fully deconstructed. That was effective as far as it went, but individuals remain vulnerable.
Disagreeing with religion, Dawkins style, isn't enough, because content and belief are a cover story for psychological process, and arguing with the content isn't a very effective form of attack.
The next stage of secularisation will be wider awareness of process. Once that starts happening - and it's beginning already in other areas - social and political institutions that derive their power from psychological manipulation will have a tough time surviving.
It's going to be a very interesting century.
However, you're still assuming, a priori, that the Church is the principal and not the agent in this story. Your narrative puts the Church in the role of being the one trying to manipulate repression and psychological conflicts for the ends of power, when it seems just as likely that the Church is merely the tool of other political actors toward that end. In fact, the main scholarship of the left on this topic, in the works of people such as Foucault and Hannah Arendt among others, would put the church in the role of victim/tool of totalitarian tendencies of the modern capitalist, law-based state toward the ends you describe.
With your rhetorical skills, you can derive why you're wrong about the entire direction of your objections. Align culture with our nature.
Odd then, that when it's priestly unchastity he has no problem keeping silent about it at all.
Apparently in the Pope's moral reckoning, millions dying of preventable AIDS is a lesser calamity than Catholic sexual abuse and its exposure.
Luckily as Frank says, the Church is imploding - its immorality is too great to support its own weight now.
Interesting times.
So what explains, if your version is true, why people are such devout Catholics when it comes to birth control but not chastity?
There is a fundamental asymmetry between sex and birth control.
Birth control requires that you know what it is, know how to use it and are able to get your hands on it ahead of time.
Sex requires no prior knowledge, and while it does require some forethought, it requires less forethought than safe sex.
In short, safe sex is planned, unsafe sex is (or at least can be) unplanned. Social mores operate more powerfully on planned actions.
The basic problem, as I see it, is that there was such a "Victorian" repressive attitude to sexuality in Ireland generally - generally fostered by the Church, but perhaps also due to other factors - that the level of ignorance about all things sexual was so high. Does kissing lead to pregnancy wasn't entirely a rhetorical question even 30 years ago - such was the level of ignorance, and of course the Church opposed sex education.
However I accept these are complex issues and a simple liberalisation of sexual mores isn't necessarilly the answer either - although it may in part have been an over-reaction to over repression earlier. The problem is that all morality has been given a bad name by the utterly hypocritical and repressive morality of the past.
No doubt a new ethical sensibility will emerge in response to excessively individualistic selfish hedonistic attitudes and perhaps the emergence of "green values", a greater emphasis on individual and social responsibilities, higher levels of education and self-awareness generally are a response to this. However its hard to see Catholicism playing a lead role in this, or any very strong role in Ireland for a very long time to come. notes from no w here
<blockgroup>
It is blockquote on ET. I recommend TribExt to easily quote with link to the stuff quoted.
European Tribune - Download ET's own Firefox add-on: TribExt
Download ET's own Firefox add-on: TribExt Do you browse the web on Firefox? Then you can download TribExt, a nifty little add-on, written by ET user someone, to navigate around European Tribune easier. It can also be used on Booman Tribune and Daily Kos.
