The Empire Strikes Back - Part II of VI
Spiritual organisation? or multinational conglomerate?
To do the honourable thing and be honest about the abuse of children by priests and nuns from the start would have rocked the boat and sullied the public image of the church, so it had to be kept under wraps. And the church behaviour wasn’t just passive lack of reaction to what was happening or simply naïve mistakes in management. Many commentators have said that people who came forward to report abuse were bullied and threatened against taking their action any further. For example, in the UK a case that was widely reported because of Cardinal Cormac O’Murphy’s mishandling of it and failure to report it to the police, was of a girl who alleged abuse from the age of 12 over a period of time by a priest who admitted having fondled her. She was able to show the letter that Cardinal Cormac O’Murphy had written to her and said the Catholic Church had “made me feel like a 12-year-old whore”. She also said, “I felt desolate. I felt no-one would help me, no-one would believe me”.
Of course, that is the kind of behaviour one might expect of, let’s say, a pharmaceutical company, that will get away with what it can where it can in order to maximise their revenue and keep their public image intact. Pharmaceutical companies are known to continue selling profitable drugs in African countries that have been banned elsewhere because of the damage they were discovered to be doing. For example, the SMON disaster in Japan (Subacute Myelo-Optico-Neuropathy – basically nerve damage, blindness and death) lasted from 1959 to the mid 1970’s and resulted in over 11,000 victims with permanent nerve damage, paralysis or blindness and thousands of deaths. For many years thought to have a bacterial or viral cause, but eventually it was discovered that the sole cause of the whole epidemic was a single active ingredient, clioquinol. Once banned the epidemic ceased, but it came to light that Ciba-Geigy who produced it had been receiving warnings about it from countries all around the world for many years, but covered it up. Even after it was demonstrated to have conclusively caused so many deaths and disabilities in Japan, Ciba-Geigy carried on pushing it in Africa, continuing to sell it in Zaire as late as 1984.
There’s also an interesting comparison to Cardinal Ratzinger’s action insisting that priests and bishops do not cooperate with investigating authorities on child abuse (see later): Ciba-Geigy contacted the doctors who had previously reported problems with Clioquinol and successfully persuaded most of them - by whatever means - to not cooperate with the legal team suing Ciba-Geigy for knowing about the dangers of Clioquinol and doing nothing about it. Luckily, a few of the doctors did assist the prosecution.
Pharmaceutical companies do not particularly claim to be moral organisations but do claim to make lots of money, and that is what they do and what we expect of them. A side benefit is that many of the products they make do actually help with some aspects of people’s health. But the Catholic Church is not – ostensibly – an organisation whose primary goal is to maximise profits for shareholders and salaries for employees; It is allegedly an organisation based on spiritual foundations offering moral guidance and support to its followers, epitomising in its behaviour a set of noble values and beliefs. Instead it has repeatedly swept such abusive behaviour of children under an already-bulging carpet in a way that allows and effectively encourages it to happen again and again, dumping its worst offenders on poorer populations with less power to protest, in behaviour so similar to a ruthless pharmaceutical company it would be hard to tell them apart. This is not the behaviour one might reasonably expect of an organisation that presents itself as having the authority of God and claims its behaviour is based on truth and essential moral principles. The Nazis undoubtably committed much worse crimes against humanity, and although people are still shocked about the extent of their brutality, we should not have been that surprised as they made it pretty clear in advance who they didn’t like. But even the Nazi’s did not plumb such depths of hypocrisy about what they were doing.
Damage limitation….
What has happened is that the change in social climate surrounding both homosexuality (more openness and more tolerance) and child abuse (more openness and less tolerance) has led to a sufficient number of people coming forward about it that all of a sudden it has hit critical mass and – Bang! – it becomes a major news story. Which of course encourages more people to come forward about what had happened to them too because now they know individually that they weren’t the only ones. And, after being previously abandoned by the church, they are at least now more likely to be believed by the wider population.
So now the genie is out of the bottle and it can’t possibly be put back, the Church authorities are on a damage-limitation exercise and are taking steps to stop it happening in future. And with breath-taking hypocrisy, before his death Pope John Paul II said that there must be openness and honesty in dealing with this issue. Had he only just been elected himself, that might have been a reasonable statement to make, but given he had been on his throne since 1978 and been helping to keep the situation hidden for a long time, that was just hypocritically and blatantly pandering to the public’s new awareness of the situation rather than an honest expression of moral policy.
…and wilful obstruction of justice
In futile attempts to stop the genie escaping some years ago and with the support of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger issued the extreme threat of excommunication to Catholic officials in the USA if they cooperated with police authorities on child abuse cases, saying it was a matter for the church to deal with. For a committed and believing Catholic, to threaten excommunication is tantamount to threatening eternal death. But rather than dealing with the issues he then sat on a number of cases child abuse for seven years doing nothing, presumably hoping that they’d go away over time. It was only with the impending demise of the Pope John Paul II that suddenly these matters seemed to be dealt with rather urgently. Someone with a less charitable and more cynical nature than myself might suggest it was because he had his eye on the forthcoming vacancy and didn’t want too many unresolved issues dug up at a time that might spoil his chances.
Spiritual Organisation? Or Mafia?
But prior to his recent election to the papacy, when the news about not just about the extent of child abuse but of the church’s active involvement in the cover-up was gathering momentum, police investigations did start making progress. Mindful of the threats by Cardinal Ratzinger, in the USA Cardinal Roger Mahoney said he wouldn’t cooperate unless subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. 61-year-old former Catholic nun Pauline Salvucci has claimed that bishops made deliberate and determined decisions to protect sexual predators. Parents of abused children were actively deceived that the problems would be taken care of. This deliberate obstruction of justice has led her to actively campaign for the Catholic Church to be investigated as a corrupt organisation under the RICO legislation which stands for Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organisations: laws created with the specific intention of cracking open the vault of secrecy and abuse of power that is the hallmark of the mafia.
The mafia also does not claim to be a moral organisation, and we generally expect the mafia to have moral standards lower even than pharmaceutical companies. For what is supposed to be a moral organisation of spiritual guidance, it is a sad and public indictment of how low the Catholic Church has sunk: That it took the threat of the consequences of failing to cooperate with a grand jury and campaigns for the RICO legislation to be used, in order to get cooperation with investigating authorities who were attempting to discover how extensive had been both the abuse and the cover-up. Roger Mahoney did eventually testify in front of a grand jury.
In fact, it was fairly recently discovered that it was Pope John XXIII who, with his papal seal, issued a 69-page document in 1962 to every Catholic bishop, calling for the strictest secrecy in dealing with accusations of abuse; a document described by one lawyer as “explosive” and by another as “a devious attempt to conceal criminal conduct and is a blueprint for deception and concealment”. So there has been acknowledgement that there was a serious problem with abuse allegations for at least 40 years and concerted efforts to conceal crimes and obstruct justice for victims coming from the pope himself. This makes it hard to justify claims that the Catholic church is NOT a corrupt organisation that is rotten to the core.
In the next instalment: What the Vatican really thinks about children’s rights, and how guilty was Pope John Paul II?
To do the honourable thing and be honest about the abuse of children by priests and nuns from the start would have rocked the boat and sullied the public image of the church, so it had to be kept under wraps. And the church behaviour wasn’t just passive lack of reaction to what was happening or simply naïve mistakes in management. Many commentators have said that people who came forward to report abuse were bullied and threatened against taking their action any further. For example, in the UK a case that was widely reported because of Cardinal Cormac O’Murphy’s mishandling of it and failure to report it to the police, was of a girl who alleged abuse from the age of 12 over a period of time by a priest who admitted having fondled her. She was able to show the letter that Cardinal Cormac O’Murphy had written to her and said the Catholic Church had “made me feel like a 12-year-old whore”. She also said, “I felt desolate. I felt no-one would help me, no-one would believe me”.
Of course, that is the kind of behaviour one might expect of, let’s say, a pharmaceutical company, that will get away with what it can where it can in order to maximise their revenue and keep their public image intact. Pharmaceutical companies are known to continue selling profitable drugs in African countries that have been banned elsewhere because of the damage they were discovered to be doing. For example, the SMON disaster in Japan (Subacute Myelo-Optico-Neuropathy – basically nerve damage, blindness and death) lasted from 1959 to the mid 1970’s and resulted in over 11,000 victims with permanent nerve damage, paralysis or blindness and thousands of deaths. For many years thought to have a bacterial or viral cause, but eventually it was discovered that the sole cause of the whole epidemic was a single active ingredient, clioquinol. Once banned the epidemic ceased, but it came to light that Ciba-Geigy who produced it had been receiving warnings about it from countries all around the world for many years, but covered it up. Even after it was demonstrated to have conclusively caused so many deaths and disabilities in Japan, Ciba-Geigy carried on pushing it in Africa, continuing to sell it in Zaire as late as 1984.
There’s also an interesting comparison to Cardinal Ratzinger’s action insisting that priests and bishops do not cooperate with investigating authorities on child abuse (see later): Ciba-Geigy contacted the doctors who had previously reported problems with Clioquinol and successfully persuaded most of them - by whatever means - to not cooperate with the legal team suing Ciba-Geigy for knowing about the dangers of Clioquinol and doing nothing about it. Luckily, a few of the doctors did assist the prosecution.
Pharmaceutical companies do not particularly claim to be moral organisations but do claim to make lots of money, and that is what they do and what we expect of them. A side benefit is that many of the products they make do actually help with some aspects of people’s health. But the Catholic Church is not – ostensibly – an organisation whose primary goal is to maximise profits for shareholders and salaries for employees; It is allegedly an organisation based on spiritual foundations offering moral guidance and support to its followers, epitomising in its behaviour a set of noble values and beliefs. Instead it has repeatedly swept such abusive behaviour of children under an already-bulging carpet in a way that allows and effectively encourages it to happen again and again, dumping its worst offenders on poorer populations with less power to protest, in behaviour so similar to a ruthless pharmaceutical company it would be hard to tell them apart. This is not the behaviour one might reasonably expect of an organisation that presents itself as having the authority of God and claims its behaviour is based on truth and essential moral principles. The Nazis undoubtably committed much worse crimes against humanity, and although people are still shocked about the extent of their brutality, we should not have been that surprised as they made it pretty clear in advance who they didn’t like. But even the Nazi’s did not plumb such depths of hypocrisy about what they were doing.
Damage limitation….
What has happened is that the change in social climate surrounding both homosexuality (more openness and more tolerance) and child abuse (more openness and less tolerance) has led to a sufficient number of people coming forward about it that all of a sudden it has hit critical mass and – Bang! – it becomes a major news story. Which of course encourages more people to come forward about what had happened to them too because now they know individually that they weren’t the only ones. And, after being previously abandoned by the church, they are at least now more likely to be believed by the wider population.
So now the genie is out of the bottle and it can’t possibly be put back, the Church authorities are on a damage-limitation exercise and are taking steps to stop it happening in future. And with breath-taking hypocrisy, before his death Pope John Paul II said that there must be openness and honesty in dealing with this issue. Had he only just been elected himself, that might have been a reasonable statement to make, but given he had been on his throne since 1978 and been helping to keep the situation hidden for a long time, that was just hypocritically and blatantly pandering to the public’s new awareness of the situation rather than an honest expression of moral policy.
…and wilful obstruction of justice
In futile attempts to stop the genie escaping some years ago and with the support of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger issued the extreme threat of excommunication to Catholic officials in the USA if they cooperated with police authorities on child abuse cases, saying it was a matter for the church to deal with. For a committed and believing Catholic, to threaten excommunication is tantamount to threatening eternal death. But rather than dealing with the issues he then sat on a number of cases child abuse for seven years doing nothing, presumably hoping that they’d go away over time. It was only with the impending demise of the Pope John Paul II that suddenly these matters seemed to be dealt with rather urgently. Someone with a less charitable and more cynical nature than myself might suggest it was because he had his eye on the forthcoming vacancy and didn’t want too many unresolved issues dug up at a time that might spoil his chances.
Spiritual Organisation? Or Mafia?
But prior to his recent election to the papacy, when the news about not just about the extent of child abuse but of the church’s active involvement in the cover-up was gathering momentum, police investigations did start making progress. Mindful of the threats by Cardinal Ratzinger, in the USA Cardinal Roger Mahoney said he wouldn’t cooperate unless subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. 61-year-old former Catholic nun Pauline Salvucci has claimed that bishops made deliberate and determined decisions to protect sexual predators. Parents of abused children were actively deceived that the problems would be taken care of. This deliberate obstruction of justice has led her to actively campaign for the Catholic Church to be investigated as a corrupt organisation under the RICO legislation which stands for Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organisations: laws created with the specific intention of cracking open the vault of secrecy and abuse of power that is the hallmark of the mafia.
The mafia also does not claim to be a moral organisation, and we generally expect the mafia to have moral standards lower even than pharmaceutical companies. For what is supposed to be a moral organisation of spiritual guidance, it is a sad and public indictment of how low the Catholic Church has sunk: That it took the threat of the consequences of failing to cooperate with a grand jury and campaigns for the RICO legislation to be used, in order to get cooperation with investigating authorities who were attempting to discover how extensive had been both the abuse and the cover-up. Roger Mahoney did eventually testify in front of a grand jury.
In fact, it was fairly recently discovered that it was Pope John XXIII who, with his papal seal, issued a 69-page document in 1962 to every Catholic bishop, calling for the strictest secrecy in dealing with accusations of abuse; a document described by one lawyer as “explosive” and by another as “a devious attempt to conceal criminal conduct and is a blueprint for deception and concealment”. So there has been acknowledgement that there was a serious problem with abuse allegations for at least 40 years and concerted efforts to conceal crimes and obstruct justice for victims coming from the pope himself. This makes it hard to justify claims that the Catholic church is NOT a corrupt organisation that is rotten to the core.
In the next instalment: What the Vatican really thinks about children’s rights, and how guilty was Pope John Paul II?
posted by Mike Hersee at 12:49 pm
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