The bishop takes full responsibility
It sounds as if the people who run Ireland are finally pissed off at the church.
Tough new laws to force the disclosure of information on child sexual abuse are to be introduced in response to another damning report on the failure of the Catholic Church to protect child abuse victims.
The withholding of information about serious offences against a child will be made a criminal offence, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter announced yesterday following the publication of the report on the handling of sex abuse claims in the diocese of Cloyne.
Which makes the necessary point that what the church has been doing all this time is a crime.
The report found that the Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, misled the minister for children by claiming the church’s guidelines for handling abuse cases were being fully complied with. It also found he falsely told the Health Service Executive (HSE) that allegations of abuse were being reported to gardaí.
In other words, he lied. The bishop lied. He lied to government bodies. He did it to protect his friends and colleagues at the expense of victims, who were children. He lied when he said he and his friends were in compliance. The bishop lied. His subordinates were raping children, and the bishop lied about it.
In fact, two-thirds of complaints made between 1996 and 2008 were not reported to the Garda and no complaint was passed to the HSE during this period.
The report accuses the Vatican, through its opposition to the Irish bishops’ procedures for handling child sexual abuse, of giving comfort to dissenters within the church who did not want to implement them. In a secret letter to the bishops, Rome describes the 1996 rules as “merely a study document” and not official.
They did what they wanted to do, which was good for them, at the expense of children who were victims of their organization – their Thing.
As Ms Fitzgerald pointed out: “This is not a catalogue of failure from a different era. This is not about an Ireland of 50 years ago. This is about Ireland now.”
…
“It is truly scandalous that people who presented a public face of concern continued to maintain a private agenda of concealment and evasion,” Mr Shatter commented.
The bishop “apologized” all over again.
Bishop Magee repeated earlier apologies for his failure to ensure abuse victims were fully supported and responded to. While insisting he was fully supportive of the 1996 church guidelines on abuse cases, he admitted he should have taken a much firmer role in ensuring their implementation.
“I am sorry that this happened and I unreservedly apologise to all those who suffered additional hurt because of the flawed implementation of the church procedures, for which I take full responsibility,” he said in a statement.
Oh, bullshit. That’s just words. Words are easy.
Ophelia:
As I pointed out in the previous thread, that’s what canon law requires the bishop to do. Canon law requires that the bishops avoid scandal that would shake people’s faith in the church, if they can, and says that canon law trumps all other law.
The bishop may not have been protecting his friends and subordinates mainly out of personal loyalty, or to avoid scandal that reflects on him, but out of loyalty to the Church—either because he really believes it’s the highest law, or because he’d be in very deep shit with his bosses at the Vatican if he didn’t.
That is the policy that has been in place all along, and it’s still in place. The Catholic Church explicitly views itself as the most important organization in the world, and the furtherance of itself as the best thing for the world, such that its own law supersedes all other law, and its own interests supersede all other interests.
Canon law is explicitly Machiavellian about this sort of thing. Hypocrisy about these things isn’t condemned, and is not just allowed, but is absolutely required, to the extent you think you can get away with it.
The bishop was only following orders.
Perhap this will lead to an explicit rejection of “canon law” by the Irish government. I can only hope so.
What the fuck does “I take full responsibility” mean? Does it mean he will actually do something, such as being a champion for the compensation of victims? Does it mean he will actively promote the arrest and punishment of child rapists and abusers in his organization? Or is it just an empty phrase parrotted by a man who is himself a criminal as unindicted accessory after the fact to many crimes? Will he put himself personally on the hook? You figure!
Paul – right – I know that, but I was teasing out the point that what this means in practice is basically just mafia-like.
sailor – exactly. It’s just pious mouthing that means absolutely nothing. At this stage of the game it’s beyond disgusting. It’s pretending to apologize while having absolutely no intention of stopping. Sorry to say “absolutely” twice but that’s the Catholic church for you.
sailor:
Last I heard, Bishop Magee’s whereabouts were unknown—even to the Archbishop who had appointed him, who said the bishop is “accountable only to the Pope”—and there was considerable speculation that Magee had fled to the Vatican.
Maybe he’s just hiding out from the press to avoid digging his PR hole deeper, but I hope he’s rightly fearful of arrest for his crimes—and questioning that would put him in a position of implicating his superiors, because he was just following orders from the very top. I hope he thinks the Irish government is getting that tough, and I fervently hope he’s right. I’d like to think that the recent comparatively tough talk by the Irish government isn’t just talk.
I’m very encouraged the the government is even talking as tough as it is—it’s just amazing how far the Irish have come in questioning Church privilege—but it’s still not talking tough enough. It’s not forcing the point that this crap was the policy dictated by the Vatican, enshrined in basic canon law, and still is, and the Vatican is not even hinting that it could possibly ever change.
I don’t think the Vatican will ever change the crucial points of canon law, although they might rephrase it with enough bafflegab for a certain kind of public deniability. The problem is that the relevant points of canon law reflect basic Catholic theology. The Catholic Church is never, ever going to admit that it isn’t the final moral authority, or that priests in particular aren’t clearly, unequivocally bound by that authority. The whole point of canon law is to make clear what Catholics and especially priests must and must not do, when push comes to shove, irrespective of what civil law or their own consciences say. That’s why it’s called canon law.
Yesterday the Irish Minister for Children said “Never again will someone be allowed to place the protection of their institution above the protection of children.”
Unfortunately, I don’t believe it. The basic conflict between canon law and civil law (and human conscience) is still there, full strength. Bishops are still under standing orders to avoid scandal at the cost of violating human rights laws and perpetuating harm to children. They’re still not allowed to do what they or anyone else thinks is right, if it violates canon law.
Until that becomes the big issue, don’t count on any reforms being real and lasting. The Vatican is clearly trying to weather this storm without changing the fundamentally inhuman, authoritarian, self-promoting policy that they know predictably results in this sort of thing.
Maybe the tough talk will be followed by arrests and criminal inquiries that get people like Magee to say that they were just following orders, and that the orders came from the top. Maybe authorities are working their way up to “what did the Pope know and when did he know it?”
The problem is that we already know what the Pope knew and when he knew it—it’s written down in canon law and published for all the world to see, and we have writings from the Vatican reminding bishops that yes, canon law is what counts when push comes to shove.
I’d really like to think that the Irish government and its lawyers are being cagey and methodical, preferring to get the bishops to implicate the cardinals and the cardinals to implicate the Pope, themselves, and to get everybody to admit that everybody knew what the orders meant and that they really were definite orders to act as they did.
I find it hard to believe they’ll really do that. I don’t think they’re going to force the point that canon law requires an international criminal conspiracy to cover up and thus perpetuate systematic human rights abuses. If they’re not even suggesting that possibility now, they’re probably not going to press the perpetrators to fess up.
I think they’ll settle for simply sending the message that the Church is going to get away with that sort of thing less often. The Church’s calculus of scandal will have to change, because getting away with this shit will be harder, but they will not have to change their fundamental priorities, enshrined in canon law. Canon law will still say that criminal coverups and conspiracies are required if you think you can get away with them, and the secular authorities will continue to gloss over the fundamental conflict between canon law and secular law. The secular authorities will apply practical pressure for modest reform, by making coverups less feasible, but they will shy away from the issue of whether priests should follow secular law when the Vatican says to commit criminal acts.
I may be wrong; I hope so.
One reason I’m pessimistic about the real issues being addressed head-on is that the issue of secular law vs. personal conscience is terribly fraught. Almost everybody thinks you should violate secular law, sometimes, if the law is unjust. Canon law is not wrong about that.
The Catholics are right, in some cases, to think that priests should disobey secular law that is wrong. I certainly think so—e.g., if somebody in a Muslim country names a teddy bear Muhammad and has a price on her head, I’m all for priests illegally offering her sanctuary and smuggling her out of the country.
Given that, it’s really hard to say when and how you’re morally allowed to use “your own conscience” in violation of secular law. (Are you allowed to stone somebody for blasphemy in a country where blasphemy is legal, and stoning is illegal, if your religion-crazed conscience says you should? Oh hell no.)
The underlying problem is that specifically religious morality is never a good excuse. Most people aren’t ready for that idea, and I doubt the Irish government is going to push things that far.
I wrote 2 apologies for the Archbishop in Ireland, who is preparing to give an apology after the scathing Cloyne report, which showed that in 2011 the Catholic church continues to be criminally negligent about clergy child sex. Both apologies are completely honest, so they are inadmissible in today’s Catholic church:
1) Let’s be honest. We don’t care. A few of our priests raped your kids. We don’t care. It’s a nuisance. They’re only kids. Let’s get back to fighting women priests, condoms, and gays, and fixing everyone else in this world. Now shut up, go home, and don’t bring this up again. God bless, fools.
2) I’m so embarrassed to be a Catholic priest today. We raped tens of thousands of children. We hid the truth. We lied about it. We ignored the children. I am so sick to my stomach about how we disgraced God, that I can’t forgive myself or anyone else in the Catholic church. For the future of the church, we have all decided to resign.
Pope Benedict decided that the only way to save the church was to have us all resign. Today. We are going to use church money to enact laws to force all of us to be put in jail for the rest of our lives. Benedict (who has dropped the title Pope, effective immediately) is knocking on the door of a jail today asking to be put in the general population. The rest of us think that the only way for God to save our souls after the way we’ve disgraced the church is to spend the rest of our lives trying to save the souls of prisoners, the worst people on earth. I’ve cried all day about the fact that we didn’t try to save the souls of the best people on earth – the poor, innocent children that we raped.
We have hired financial people to sell all of our churches and to purchase replacement buildings that are smaller and cheaper. We have invested well – we’re going to make a ton of money. Half will be set up in an open account for therapy for victims of child rape. If you were raped by a priest, go to therapy any time. We’ll pay. We are so sorry for what we’ve put you through. If you weren’t raped by a priest and go anyway, we’ll pay. That’s part of our Christian contribution to show the world how sorry we are. We never earned that money, and we hope the parishioners think it’s a good investment in the future.
The other half of the money will go to cure hunger. We’re crying that we didn’t think of this earlier. Children around the world are dying because they can’t eat, and we are in buildings that are so expensive, that we could have fed them by trading down. We’re finally doing it. We also promise that all current priests will never eat more than the most underfed person on earth.
We’re hoping we don’t go to hell for taking so long, and letting so many children suffer.
For whoever continues the church, it’s actually so simple – please follow the 10 Commandments, and do What Jesus Would Do. If any of us had done that, none of this would have happened. Forget the importance of money. It works out God doesn’t care about money.
We’re so sorry we have disgraced you, and set such a horrible example for you, and we are mortally sorry we have disgraced God. God bless you. We were fools.
That’s brilliant, Patrick. I think I’ll make it a guest post.