Parking tickets are one thing, and…
The Irish Times notes how globally the Vatican thinks and acts.
Ultimate responsibility for the way in which the safety of children was so recklessly ignored does not lie with any individual bishop. It does not lie even with the Irish hierarchy as a whole. It lies with the Vatican. We know this because the approach to allegations of child abuse was consistent, not simply between bishops or across Irish dioceses, but around the world. There was a way of doing things – keeping the crimes secret and moving the abusers on to another parish until the whole pattern began to repeat itself.
World government with a vengeance, that is – a theistic institution that has managed to make itself a state yet has global authority, and is focused on its own well-being before that of anyone else on the planet.
It is in the light of the primary role of the Vatican that we must see the unwillingness of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and of the papal nuncio to respond to requests for information from the Murphy commission. The Taoiseach, in a painfully deferential statement in the Dáil, has endorsed these refusals as acts of “good faith” consistent with diplomatic norms. This submissiveness is entirely inappropriate to the leader of a republic, some of whose most vulnerable citizens have been grievously harmed by the policies and practices of the Holy See.
Depressing, isn’t it? Once again, the powerful prosperous men of the church and the Vatican are protected and the vulnerable people are thrown to the wolves – by their own government. The prosperous men of the church and the Vatican matter, and the mere people don’t.
The Vatican does not do things lightly. When it refused to deal with the commission except through diplomatic contacts at the level of one state to another, it was not being precious. It was asserting a claim that is crucial to its efforts to avoid the consequences of its own policies. The insistence on being treated as a state rather than as a church is the key to its claim of sovereign immunity.
Which is a thing that it shouldn’t want to have. Yet it does want to have it. It wants to do bad things to people and get away with it. It wouldn’t put it that way, of course, but that’s what it wants and what it’s been doing.
It is quite disgraceful that the Taoiseach should play along with this manoeuvre by endorsing the Vatican’s behaviour towards the commission. If the Vatican is indeed to be regarded simply as a foreign state, then it is a state that has colluded in the commission of vile crimes against Irish citizens.
Quite.
It’s time to downgrade the Roman Catholic Church to a religious organisation. It is wrong for it to be considered to be a state, and it should be wrong for countries to establish relationships with it as though it were. The Vatican should be considered to be, what it truly is, Italian territory, and the Church should be subject to the law of the nation. This would immediately put every other Roman Catholic Church around the world in a completely different relationship with the Vatican, and this would be healthy for all concerned, including the jaded celibates who are imprisoned there.
It would be nothing short of disastrous for Britain to amend the Act of Succession until this anomaly is dealt with, and the British should be loud in their refusal accept a head of state who would be subordinate to the head of another state.
If you read Peter de Rosa’s history of the popes you will not be surprised at the actions of the “Holy See” respecting Irish children. It has done far worse things than this, and has called them holy.
Yes, moving paedophile/erring priests to different parishes was very common, and not only with diocesan secular priests, such as the well-known Father Fortune, from Ferns-but also those belonging to religious orders. For example, Father Brendan Smith, being one of the most notorious sex offenders, was moved from various places over a very long period by his own religious order.
I commit to memory some concerned people in Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, (where I had resided for over a decade) telling me dreadful stories about sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests and when they complained to the powers that be, they were held in contempt. They were literally ostrasized by most people in the community, because they refused to go to mass and also because of them having pointed a finger at the holy clergy. They were classed as a bunch of heathens, by some holier than thou cra-thumpers, in this little valley of the squinting windows.
One particular family who had lived in America, were very up-to-date about the world and were just not going to stand by when they knew children were abused -this, sadly, included their own.
The Norbertine priests of BJD protected one of the most serious peadophile priests this country of ours has ever seen. Not only was Father B.S. not defrocked by the Vatican – he was also buried in the early hours of the morning, when no media was about – in consecrated ground beside his other religious priests. Once a (Norbertine) priest always a priest.
What’s next? Catholic churches should be considered as embassies? The clergy granted diplomatic immunity? This is just sickening.
Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick had the audacity to put it to his ‘own’ parishioners/clergy of Limerick diocese, as to whether he should step down in the wake of the Murphy Report. Neither of the latter had absolutely anything got to do with his ministry – when he presided in the Dublin archdiocese.
The bishop did not take into account, in the slightest, his ‘inexcusable’ behaviour towards victims and parishioners of Dublin archdiocese, where there were serious consequences in the aftermath of child abuse at the hands of his clergy.
It had to clearly pointed out to him by the media. And Diarmuid Martin, of whom the latter was pushed by the former!
I reckon he was either oblivious to the reality of his tenuous position – or was very cunning in trying to get sympathy votes from his dearest parishioners. He, perhaps thinks, like the rest of them, that he is invincible.
Ah, it lies with the Vatican.
Well, I should have remembered how it dealt with a secret Vatican document concerning sexual child abuse that oneinfour brought to the fore some few years ago.
Crimen Sollicitatiois” “The Crime of Solicitation”) during 1962. …
http://www.religioustolerance.org
Well, we are dealing here with the heavy hand of the Vatican State. The likes of Dr. Donal Murray would be only a mere altar-boy in its hands.
It wouldn’t stop the Vatican issuing extraordinary statements about HIV, or contraception, or homosexuality, ad infinitum, but it would be huge boost for the concept of secular democracy if the Vatican were no longer recognised as a state by the world.
Correct me if I’m simplifying, but is it right to say that in an otherwise reasonably enlightened modern Europe we have a small but disproportionately influential theocracy, a reactionary dictatorship defined by religion, who (technically at least) has power over some one billion people, with an abhorrent history, medieval anti-rational attitudes that ignore the needs of real-life, thinking human beings in favour of superstitions and dogmas, and this state is not only not condemned, not only tolerated, but actively venerated and its head deferred to and grovelled before by Europe’s leaders?
Phew feel better now. If only a European leader would have the balls to say something like that in a public speech.
Didn’t Stalin ask how many divisions the Pope had? Perhaps that wasn’t the right question, but perhaps it wasn’t entirely wrong, either.
The Vatican only became a sovereign state in 1929 following an agreement between then then Pope, Pius XI and Mussolini.
I see no reason why the rest of the world should recognise an agreement drawn up by a religious dictator and a fascist dictator.
That is indeed true, Matt, but in 1870, when the Vatican states came to be incorporated in the newly unified Italy, the Vatican was at least guaranteed extra-territoriality, and it remained a fifth wheel until 1929, whe the Lateran treaty was signed with Mussolini. From 1870 until 1929 the Vatican opposed democracy and secularism in Italy. Eventually it tried to dominate Italian democracy by forming its own party, which was not a great success. So, looking for another way to subvert the power of the people, Pius XI effectively dissolved the Catholic Party in 1922, by revoking its support, which ended the church’s flirtation with democracy, and this permitted the triumph of the fascists, who returned the favour by turning the Vatican into a dictatorial state much like its own. That this continues until today is one of the anomalies of history, and gives the Roman Catholic Church an unprecedented degree of control over political decision making in other countries, since it works on two levels, as a state, and as a church institution in other states. It really is past time for this fantasy of a Vatican State to be brought to an end, for the Vatican is no more a friend of democracy now than it has ever been, and its cavalier treatment of the Murphy Commission is just one further example of its contempt for due process and human rights.
As an Irish expatriate who left in the 1980s I am still taken aback by the way Irish society remains oblivious to the problem of separation of church and state. Articles saying there was a failure of canon law or a failure of the vatican etc.
Why should these need even be consulted? If a priest abuses a child it is criminal rather than canon law that needs to be applied. And what is ‘canon law’ in the first place but a catholic version of Sharia law, for the sole benefit of the Irish Taliban (the Ballyban?).
The positive thing to come out of this whole sorry mess is the exposure of the term ‘mental reservation’ – meaning knowingly lying by twisting words in order to protect the church – demolishing any pretense the hierarchy had towards being moral guides.
I was stunned to hear Mary O’ Rourke, Fine Fail TD, who is known as the Mammy of the Dail – stand up, the other day, against the Roman Catholic church and its despicable treatment of women. It was such a rare treat to hear her lambast the church. She said something to the effect that women were nothing more dirt in its eyes; and that they had the cheek to prance around in fancy frocks spouting out about moral issues when their own morals needed to be greatly examined.
“Fianna Fáil TD Mary O’Rourke said that until the Catholic Church again started to have an affinity with people and their “ordinary, everyday problems” it was “doomed to failure and we are so doomed too”. She said it was appalling divorced people could not go to a church of their own choosing to have a marriage recognised and that women had been treated by the church as if they were “dirty people”.”
The failure of the Vatican’s representative to cooperate with the Murphy commission was “just not good enough”, Mrs O’Rourke said. ireland.com
Let’s hope she doesn’t let that thought fade away, as Madeleine Bunting did.
Following from Eric’s comment about a British head of state owing allegiance to a foreign head of state, does it follow that Catholics should not be in public office, or at least in high office, outside the “Holy” See?
(I do not mean that I agree with this, I’m just saying that the argument seems to lead there and probably that conclusion would be unacceptable.)
IIRC, when Locke talked about “toleration”, he didn’t think it should be applied to Catholics, for precisely the reason above: their loyalty could not be relied upon.
We’ve certainly had recent examples of apparent conflict of this type, also known as Vatican interference in the internal affairs of a foreign state – the Stupak amendment in the US, and Ruth Kelly in Britain. Both of these were to do with abortion.
And this also takes us into familiar territory because Kelly was “Communities Secretary” at the time.