Yesterday’s gone
Sean Brady says no no no no no he won’t go. He doesn’t want to. It’s not fair. All the others. He was only. They didn’t use to. Back then it was all. You just don’t. We all thought that.
The cardinal, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, is under pressure to stand down after it emerged that he took part in a secret canonical tribunal in 1975 at which two minors were made to swear oaths of silence about their allegations against the paedophile priest Father Brendan Smyth.
Smyth went on to rape hundreds more children across Ireland, the UK and the United States before he died in prison in 1997.
Well, yes, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Look here – suppose you’re an executive of BP, or General Motors, or Enron, or Lehman Brothers, or any other fine upstanding capitalist institution. Suppose a couple of children credibly report being raped by one of your subordinates. What do you do? You force them to swear secrecy, of course! And you transfer that subordinate from London to Salford, or Galveston to New York, or whatever it may be; you move the subordinate to a city different from the city where the two raped children live, thus insuring that that subordinate will not be raping those two children again. Simple! Problem solved! The children have been made to shut up, and the rapist has been moved, so it’s a win-win. Everybody is protected, everybody is safe, everybody is happy.
So what possible reason could there be for Sean Brady to quit his excellent high-status job?
Marie Collins, a campaigner who was abused by a priest as a child, said that she was not surprised. “I met with him six weeks ago and he gave no indicaton whatsoever that he felt any remorse or regret or even grasped that he’d done anything wrong in the Brendan Smyth case, that he’d left an abuser free for 18 years to continue abusing.”…
“He [Cardinal Brady] was well aware for the following 18 years that Brendan Smyth was free to continue abusing and he did nothing about it,” she said.
“In his statement he has not even referred to the past, so I think it’s an indication that nothing is changing in the Church, the attitudes are still the same for all the words that we are getting.”
Forgive and forget, Marie Collins. Cast not the first stone. That was then, this is now. Move on. Spilt milk. Get over it. Get a life.
Is it just me or do links to the Times never work?
Hm – it works from here.
Moving erring priests to far off distant lands and parishes in the back of beyond, has always been the name of the game with the church. Out of sight out of mind. Father Sean Fortune was also shifted to a very rural parish in Palfour Co Wexford – where he continued with his antics.
Institutional Dublin children were also sent to industrial schools in the country and visa versa with country children – to prevent parents from having too much access. Kathleen O’ Malley, author of “Childhood Inrerrupted” is one typical example.
The pope is obviously holding on tight to Cardinal Sean Brady, in order to see the former through his impending Autumn visit to Britain.
I came across this interesting survey.
Yesterday’s gone and tomorow he is not going to be out of sight. Not – if he has the help of a new bishop.
Ophelia: “Forgive and forget, Marie Collins. Cast not the first stone. That was then, this is now. Move on. Spilt milk. Get over it. Get a life.”
To which I would add that hoary old favourite saying of caught out officialdom: “I think that we shouldn’t focus on the past. Let’s turn our minds instead to the future.”
Next it’ll be ‘lessons have been learned’.
Good job he’s religious though. I mean, if someone as callous and dishonest as Sean Brady had been an atheist, he would presumably have shot up an orphanage with an AK-47. But, thanks to the ethical underpinning that faith provides, he merely covered up child rape and doesn’t think it’s a big deal. So, proof that the faithiests are right…
Thanks, I guess it’s just me, then. Thanks for fixing my italics as well. Sorry …