Turn the other what?
The LA Times notices that the pope has a problem. The problem is that instead of just saying ‘We did a terrible terrible terrible thing, and we did it for decade upon decade,’ the Vatican is lashing out at 1) news outlets that report the terrible things the church has been doing and 2) other institutions that do terrible things. This is infantile and disgusting, and it is unworthy of an institution that (to repeat a point I’ve made a few hundred times) purports to have a higher and better morality than anyone else. It is unworthy because it persists in caring more about the self than the object of the terrible actions. This fact all by itself shows that they are if anything morally worse than the majority of reasonably good people. There’s a reason for that. The reason is this: if you become convinced – if you have good reason to realize – that you have caused appalling harm and suffering to another sentient being, then the only thing you should be feeling about that is agonized repentance. That’s all there is to it. Your angushed empathy and regret should simply inundate all self-concerned feelings, blotting them out of your awareness. This is all the more true if you’re a huge powerful age-encrusted institution that is able to command deference and obedience – right down to literal kneeling – from millions of people and even from heads of state, and the sentient beings are underage, small, weak, and defenseless. You should be grinding your head into the dirt with remorse, in the intervals of doing everything you can to repair the damage to your victims. The last thing you should be doing is even thinking about how all this will affect you. Yet the church is doing exactly that. It’s not surprising, but it damn well is shocking.
Earlier in the week, New York’s archbishop, Timothy Dolan, used his blog to dismiss the New York Times’ reports and defend the pontiff’s record by arguing that authorities outside the church also are culpable…Sadly, this latest everybody-is-responsible-so-nobody-is-to-blame defense is of a piece with a little-noticed section of Benedict’s letter to the Irish church in which he seemed to blame the crisis, in part, on “new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society.”
Ah – it wasn’t little noticed around here. I noticed it, I can tell you. Jumped right on it, I did.
Behold the archbishop of New York, if you can bear to. He certainly has no problem forgetting all about the powerless victims of his powerful church, nor any hesitation about talking like a petulant nine-year-old rebuked for punching a smaller child. Moral squalor at its finest.
What adds to our anger over the nauseating abuse and the awful misjudgment in reassigning such a dangerous man, though, is the glaring fact that we never see similar headlines that would actually be “news”: How about these, for example?
– “Doctor Asserts He Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since Dr. Huth admits in the article that he, in fact, told the archdiocese the abusing priest could be reassigned under certain restrictions, a prescription today recognized as terribly wrong;
– “Doctor Asserts Public Schools Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since the data of Dr. Carol Shakeshaft concludes that the number of cases of abuse of minors by teachers, coaches, counsellors, and staff in government schools is much, much worse than by priests;
And so on and so on and so on, through Judges, Police, Lawyers, District Attorneys, Therapists, and Parole Officers. There’s Love for you, there’s Charity, there’s Agapë. There’s compassion, there’s generosity, there’s giving the shirt also. Yes we did it but so did all those other people so why don’t you yell at them too? Beautiful.
Interesting thought.
Soon, Ratzi will be visiting the UK (against much protest).
However, whatever the rights and wrongs of indciting (sp?) foreign leaders for real or spurious “war crimes”, crimes committed inside any countries’ own jurisdiction are still “allowed”, so to speak.
Now, do you think it MIGHT be possible, that if Ratzi sets foor in the UK, somone will slap an arrest-warrant on him, for complicity in child-rape within the UK’s jurisdiction?
We can but hope.
I’d love to see him spend even one night in the cells!
God (pun intended), I hate tu quoque. “They/You do it too!” is NOT a justification for anything. It’s all about trying to change the subject to get the heat off the “poor suffering Church.” And this kind of naked tribalism (“We must defend Holy Mother Church at all costs! Are they going to let a few abused children get in the way of all the good the Church has done for the past 2000 years?”) is disgusting.
To complete the thought, and I haven’t been alone in this at all: this use of tu quoque is even more egregious when the institution claims to be THE source of morality and to exercise Christ’s authority on earth.
Even to a nonbeliever, the contrast between the Church’s handling of this whole affair and the (probably fictional) bits in the gospels about Jesus’s (alleged) concern for children (“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6) is extremely striking. I mean, these are your bloody holy texts, allegedly from the mouth of your own founder, for Christ’s sake! You could at least pretend to follow them!
Here is some of the Australian media :
Media attacks Pope’s handling of abuse
The child abuse scandal rocking the Catholic Church homed in on Pope Benedict XVI, labelled the “biggest sinner” in one newspaper as the Vatican said his handling of the crisis would only strengthen his authority.
As allegations piled up of sexual molestation by priests in the scandal that has swept the United States and Europe, the media expressed shock and bewilderment in comments and editorials.
“How could the Catholics do such a thing?” asked Britain’s The Independent newspaper.
How could priests receive the host in communion “while raping children?” it wondered.
“What was going on in their souls?”
In Spain’s El Pais, a theology professor remarked that the Roman Catholic Church was quick to link abortion with sin but had “difficulty doing the same thing when it came to sexual abuse committed by people dedicated to God.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/28/2858066.htm
Yeah, most of us learn the weakness of the tu quoque position when we’re ten. Actually it’s not so much tu quoque but altri quoque.
Teacher or parent:- You haven’t done your homework/chores.
Ten year old brat:- But Jane snd Mary haven’t done their homework/chores either!
Teacher or parent:- I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about you. And stop whining!
The abortion issue of course jumps right out at one. Inflated concern for the embryo and brutal indifference to actual children.
Nearly everyone who demonstrates inflated concern for each dear and precious fetus shows profound indifference to the health and welfare of actual children and pregnant women. The Catholic Church is certainly the biggest offender, but they are not alone. Take, for example, the famously abortion-hating American political right. (No, please, do take them. We don’t want them.) With all of the right’s frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric against Obama’s proposed health care reform agenda, they never proposed any positive alternative measures whatsoever that might have done something to help cover uninsured Americans – many of whom are children – even while they used scare tactics and propaganda aimed at firing up the anti-choice “base” over “government-sponsored abortions” and “death panels.” It’s all very nauseating. (At least in the 1993 health care debate, the Republicans came up with an alternative: The substance of that alternative matches in every important way the legislation that was passed this week, natch.)
The Catholic Church forgot the best defense of all:
“You wouldn’t dare do this to the Muslims.”
Where’s the Fatwah Envy?
The RCC is just digging itself into a deeper hole. I would laugh, except children are still getting raped and criminals are still going free.
Reading this post reminds me of a similar kind of behaviour of the religious at the commission to inquire into institutional child abuse. They simply could not say they had done terrible things to institutional child abuse victims-survivors. You see, they were desperately trying to protect themselves and had the most influential barristers/counsel in the country to the back of them – telling them exactly what to say. Even up to the last minute of the commission’s work the Christian Brothers were denying ever having treated boys in the manner that they (the ex-boys) had described in their testimonies to the commission. But suddenly they caved in when they were forced to admit their wrong-doing. Judge Ryan was so disgusted with their arrogance.
Bishops/cardinals throughout the globe have also been portraying the same kind of behaviour and now, the Vatican. It’s all too typical of the powerful church. The church thinks it is invincible. It has had its flock under its knuckleduster for aeons and it wont be talked down to by it or anybody else for that matter. It hides behind its ridiculous fancy robes – and its pomp and circumstance and the Vatican City.
The RC church’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted.
Presumably the abuse has been going on for centuries.
For years, and even up to lately, I have been so utterly exasperated at the inability of the media and high profile figures to not give institutional abuse/clerical abuse the centre stage it so deserved. But thankfully all that has changed within the last couple of weeks. I now feel less irritated and grossly vindicated. What a relief! Thank you, OB, for doing your bit to express abhorrence at crimes perpetrated on innocent children in the past. It all helps to mirror the wrongdoing back to the church — who, in the main, were the perpetrators. The children in these institutions, like Goldenbridge, in the past, did not have loving parents to protect and console and guide them in life, let alone in times when they were being horrendously abused by the religious. They were also not fully equipped to highlight their grievance – due to lack of educational skills, as proper learned skills are definitely needed to bring across the reality of their pain.
There was a German survivor on several Irish child abuse websites, who was for years banging his head against an online brick wall with respect of abuse in a kinderheim in Germany. He was perpetually thrashing out his grievance to Irish traumatised victims-survivors, the abuse that occurred in his country. There was not a single thing they could do, as the majority of them could hardly write down their own painful experiences in a coherent way. So, hopefully, with all the recent media attention Germany is experiencing he will be somewhere in the background continually scraping and gnawing away at the churches robes in order to finally rip open the truth of abuse behind the seams.
“Stunning flood of claims held in secret diocesan archive …”
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/stunning-flood-of-claims-held-in-secret-diocesan-archive-2114101.html –
Also:
“The current Bishop of Verona, Mgr Giuseppe Zenti, initially accused the former students of “hallucinating”. However, the diocese had to open an inquiry after one of the accused lay brothers admitted to sexual relations with pupils.
http://www.independent.ie/…/pope-hit-by-abuse-claims-in-italian-school-2114011. html –
The pope certainly has a problem.
The other problem with the leveling of blame at other people and organizations is that it ignores the relationship between the church and the professionals, government officials, and law enforcement officers who enabled it in its enabling of child molestation. Its not like these were all random, secular strangers.
A pope with a problem – latimes.com : atheism
From the comments: I specifically want/ed to let school children and adults … it would go down in the annals of Irish history. Marie-Therese O’ Loughlin. …
http://www.reddit.com/…/comments/…/a_pope_with_a_problem_latimescom/ –
Does defenceless spell “defenseless”?
Either one; c is more usual on your side of the Atlantic, s is more usual on this side. There are a lot of words like that.
Thanks, OB. Yep, I do sometimes get confused with the different spellings, especially with “s” versus “z’ for example.
I was just reading in the blogosphere, that there are some cardinals who are not terribly enamoured with the pope, despite him getting a majority vote from them. They are seemingly of the opinion that he is too much of his own man for his own good and the good of the church, I suppose. Sounds too rather like our present taoiseach, Brian Cowen.
There is, by media accounts, snow expected in GB. It is terribly cutting biting windy weather here in Dublin that would go through one for a short cut.
That second link is broken.
Oops, so sorry, OB, about that – I pasted it directly from the google link. I shall have to master the art of URL.
The RCC has always been against secularization and the social changes since the 1960s or so. But is not the openness about sex a major factor in these scandals’ coming to light?
It probably would be unfair to trace a direct connection though the abuse must have been going on for much longer.
Marie-Thérése: that biting windy weather is because you are all unrepentant sinners!
I know, Stephen, however, there is all the time in the world next week for unrepentant sinners like us to humbly bow our heads in the confessional boxes and pour out our sins to the princes of the church and ask them for forgiveness for our past failings. Who knows, with the coming of Christ – they will have forgiven us for showing them up and having gone through them for a short cut. We unrepentant sinners are so at fault and will have just have (until Good Friday has passed) to suffer the biting bitterly windy ill-winds coming from the direction of Rome.
;-(!……….It’s freezing this Palm Sunday.
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