Please donate to clerical rapists’ defense fund
What was that I was just saying about the Catholic church presuming to lecture everyone on how to be good and what a flesh-crawlingly bad joke that is? Well spare a thought for the bishop of Ferns.
Dr Denis Brennan, the Bishop of Ferns, was inviting parishioners (and any individual priests who felt so inclined) to donate money to assist the church in footing a bill, the tally for which comes to more than €10m, to meet the legal costs of defending civil cases brought against the diocese in relation to clerical sexual abuse. In other words the Roman Catholic Church in Ferns is asking the victims of its own bitter failings to pay the price for the crime.
That’s pretty, isn’t it? Empathetic? Compassionate? Thoughtful? Sensitive? Self-aware? Humble? Remorseful? Other-regarding? Unselfish? Generous? Everything admirable?
The reports into clerical abuse in Ferns and Dublin have shown a distressing level of complicity within the wider community. How could the police, the health service, schools and many private citizens, have sat back and allowed such atrocities to happen? The priest who abused my friends was well-known as having a fondness for his altar boys, yet no one ever confronted him about it. And in its arrogance and lack of self-awareness, the church interpreted this as tacit approval.
And in its continued arrogance and lack of self-awareness, the church expects its victims to help it avoid the consequences of its generations of brutality.
Is “chutzpa” the word you were looking for? They seem to have plenty of it.
Sickening.
Something I need to get off my chest…
The term “clerical abuse” irritates the shit outa me. We don’t refer to child abuse outside the church as ‘parent abuse’ or ‘close relative abuse’ or ‘stranger abuse’.
No clerics have been abused!
Maybe I’m being overly sensitive but just pay attention – it’s the term most frequently used by clerics when talking about the issue. And I think for good reason. Like this repulsive bishop they never discuss the matter unless they are pleading for some sympathy and this term is designed to subtly confuse and distract, to soften and blur the otherwise distinct facts.
It’s child rape. Don’t let them forget it.
Spare a thought for the rapist priests.
Well, I’ve spared mine.
Well, like anyone else, even the worst of the worst, they’re entitled to their day in court. If they think they can defend the litigation, well we can’t complain if they try. It’s their right, and it’s an important one for us to support. I expect they’ll end up settling out of court like most civil litigants do.
What I’d like to know, though, is whether there are any criminal charges being pursued against individual priests. If not, why not?
Having grown up in Ireland one thing Dunphy wrote hit home for me.
“The reports into clerical abuse in Ferns and Dublin have shown a distressing level of complicity within the wider community. How could the police, the health service, schools and many private citizens, have sat back and allowed such atrocities to happen? The priest who abused my friends was well-known as having a fondness for his altar boys, yet no one ever confronted him about it. And in its arrogance and lack of self-awareness, the church interpreted this as tacit approval.”
We are not talking about some secret pedophile ring here. As Dunphy suggests this was a very well know fact of life in Ireland at that time (1970s for me). The refusal of the police to prosecute offenses by priests made it difficult or even pointless to report crimes to the legal autorities – in contrast to crimes committed by laymen (I remember one rather hasty departure from my primary school of a particular teacher who had a known penchant for touching the boys in his class).
In a way this bishop is correct. It is society at large in Ireland who has a responsibility for these crimes rather than just the individual priests or bishops. This action might have a useful, if unintended consequence of waking up the population at large to the effects of its own failure to address this known problem – hopefully by making sure that reports of such crimes are now taken seriously by the police force and the removal of the church from positions of power in the education, health and social services in Ireland.
“In a way this bishop is correct….” Well, Sigmund, perhaps so, but when you dress men up in robes, exclude women, and speak in terms of holiness, give them the power to bind or remit sins, and tell people that their eternal salvation depends on such as these, it’s not too hard to see why one might approach even their wrongdoing with caution. And when this august institution, represented by these reprehensible men, makes slight of it, and shifts the men around from parish to parish for their occasional ‘lapses’, and even makes victims bear much of the guilt for the church’s depredations on children, that ‘in a way’ can’t be allowed to bear much weight. Let’s not forget the betrayal of trust involved, not only the betrayal of young innocents, mesmerised by spiritual power.
And notice, please, how effectively the pope played this, with photo ops in the Vatican, and the gathered Irish bishops paying obeisance, just as they demand of the “faithful” back home. Dress them up with the weight of tradition, and throw people’s resentment off the track. It’s worked a thousand times before. Time to stop pretending that anyone has spiritual power, or can mediate between gods and the rest of the world. It’s all based on a lie.
Eric said:
“And notice, please, how effectively the pope played this, with photo ops in the Vatican, and the gathered Irish bishops paying obeisance, just as they demand of the “faithful” back home. “
Eric, the exact opposite is the case. That may indeed have been the intention of the Vatican but it came across as a completely out of touch and rather obvious ploy when reported in the Irish media – so much so that some bishops are now resorting to making embarrassed excuses about the whole thing –
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/bishop-i-was-uneasy-about-having-to-kiss-the-papal-ring-2089675.html
Acknowledged, Sigmund, the old magic didn’t work, but the intention was the same, to stifle resentment with the trappings of holiness. But it did work, at least in part, did it not? For you, yourself, knowing the church’s part in all this, its guilt, and continuing effort to unload this guilt onto others, said:
My point is this. Yes, if the society keeps bowing down to these men in frocks, if it continues to speak of the holiness of the church, if officials refuse to see the church (or any other religious body) as just another human institution – and I mean just another – it will be responsible, just as you say; but you can scarcely blame a brainwashed group of people for treating the pretence of holiness as the real thing. The press still does, and is overawed by ritual and regalia.
But, it’s never the real thing. That’s what people should have learned. There is no holiness, just ordinary humanity. And popes and cardinals and archbishops, imams, rabbis and priests, monks, nuns, and sadhus, who pretend to speak for god, need to be reminded of their humanity, and told to enter the human conversation, instead of pretending to rise above it. There is something so flesh-crawlingly repugnant about these continued claims that this is something that needs to be repeated and repeated until people get the point. Religion is a scourge, precisely because it makes this pretence, the pretence of speaking for a being so diversely understood as to make its ‘name’ an empty phoneme, and it will go on doing harm until we realise that no one has a right to make such claims and expect to be respected for it.
Russell, sure, they have a right to defend themselves, but the issue here was soliciting money from their ‘subjects’ – they have a legal right to do that (I assume) but not much of a moral one.
And for that matter even in terms of defending themselves, their moral rights are in considerable tension with their legal rights, I think. Given that they appoint themselves moral arbiters, they have an implied duty to be hyper-moral. It would be hyper-moral for instance to plead guilty when one is in fact guilty. There’s always that tension between legal rights and moral rights in criminal cases, isn’t there? Murderers have a legal right to defend themselves, but nobody is obliged to view that as morally justified.
In fact that’s partly the point – the legal system is always having to remind people that even guilty people have rights – which doesn’t mean we have to anoint them as Good. This is the Moazzam Begg problem in a nutshell. He had a right to due process; that doesn’t mean he’s a good guy.
The bit about the Irish bishops kissing the Pope’s ring took on a whole new meaning for me when I remembered that “ring” is also a vulgar term used in Ireland to mean “anus”.
Goldenbridge abuse victim Christine Buckley said she was “absolutely reeling” from the invitation made by Bishop Brennan for 100,000 parishioners in 80 parishes to pay €60,000 each year until 2030 to meet an outstanding debt of €1.2m. She also accused church patrons of acting “like Judas” towards victims.
That’s a good point, Eric. I think the flummery has its effect even on me – I think I see the pictures of the big grand beautiful room in the Vatican (only a little marred by the plastic water bottles at each place) and I’m ever so slightly snowed. If these were just a bunch of guys in equally expensive silk suits in an equally expensive but much more vulgar conference room in Vegas, the effect would be different.
Beware aesthetics. They should be dressed in ordinary clothes and meeting in a nasty little room at a formica-topped table under fluorescent lights. Ideally with detectives watching from behind a one-way mirror.
I was listening to the radio the other morning when presenter Jerry Ryan, RTE 2, read out a letter which singer, Sinead O’ Connor, had written to the Irish media.
In the open letter to several major Irish newspapers, she wrote, “If Christ was here, he would be burning down the Vatican. And I for one would be helping him. How long do they expect us to restrain ourselves? We have put up with this bull dung for hundreds of years.
A true Christian is someone who, in any given situation, is supposed to ask themselves what would Jesus do, then try to do that. How an organisation which has acted, decade after decade, only to protect its business interests above the interests of children can feel it has the right to dictate to us what Christians should do is beyond belief.”
Sinead, of whom I saw, innumerable times, at institutional abuse meetings, courted global controversy some years ago when she tore up a picture of the pope whilst on stage.
Bruce Arnold: “Church and State colluded in this abuse-ridden society’. Also: Medb Ruane: ”Do your Christian duty and help the Bishop balance the books”
articles can be read, if you go to OB’s link, ‘the bishop of Ferns’ in this post.
Bishop Brennan was only given this job after the controversial renowned last bishop, Brendan Comiskey, was forced to step down, amidst the child clerical sexual abuse crisis of Ferns. See: ‘Ferns Report’. Remember I told you via B&W a while back, about the time he threatened to rape Justine Mc Carthy, Reporter, when she went to his (allegedly wild parties) mansion in Wexford to investigate his trips to Bangkok.
One would think that the new Bishop of Ferns would be desperately trying to keep his head down – – in light of all the clerical abuse that occurred in the diocese – – but instead, Ferns has reared its dirty head to add fuel to the fire.
Perhaps the bishop was left with no other alternative than to take this action after the Vatican has made it explicitly clear that it has no intention of forking out funds to foot the clerical child abuse legal bill, etc. Besides, is it not typical of the holy ones to try to hoodwink the prayerful holier than thou laity. Lent is the perfect time to contemplate giving alms to the church Will the latter, I wonder, be bowing down to kiss the open their open palms at the the time of giving – – easter. Will it be raining on their abuse parade?! We shall have to wait and see. Methinks the laity will retaliate as we are knee deep in a recession. And it would take something of this nature to bring reality home.
Sorry to be off topic.
Pope’s brother denies knowledge of sexual abuse in choir he led …
6 Mar 2010 … POPE BENEDICT’S brother, Mgr Georg Ratzinger, has denied knowing about abuse cases during his time as leader of Germany’s most famous boys’ …
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/…/1224265703364.html
Re: the latest crazy Catholic twisteroo, with an exorcist trying to blame demons –
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/vatican-possessed-by-perverts%2c-says-scientist-201003112548/