The Empire Strikes Back - Part III of VI

What does the Catholic Church really think about the importance of children’s rights?

The Vatican itself has clearly expressed little regard for the issue of children being abused from the perspective of the children themselves: We all know now that Cardinal Bernard Law (as one of many) was exposed as being specifically complicit in hiding abuse by priests, moving them on without warning anyone in the destination parishes and effectively facilitating the abuse of more children. And rather than offering support he also condemned those who made complaints against specific priests by accusing them of trying to undermine the church. But when he was eventually forced to resign and was recalled to the Vatican out of the jurisdiction of US law, without any apparent punishment whatsoever. He remained an influential cardinal and was given a prestigious post at the Vatican. This meant him playing a major role in Pope John Paul II’s funeral, an action that some outraged abuse victims likened to rubbing salt into an open wound. This resulted in what was probably a first in history, whereby otherwise-committed Catholics handed out flyers among the crowds, explaining and condemning the behaviour of a prominent cardinal and his role during the funeral of an otherwise much-loved pope.

Catholic self-delusion about John Paul II
Having said that, it seems that some victims and their families were still mourning the passing of the Pope and willingly deluding themselves that John Paul II was an innocent spiritual leader doing his best to handle a recently-discovered crisis that was caused solely by others; And that he was neither responsible for either Cardinal Law’s prestigious role at the his own funeral or for creating a culture of secrecy and blatant disregard for children’s rights.

Over time, the culture of an organisation comes to reflect that of its leader as people are promoted or leave and new people become part of the organisation. It might have been ok for a new pope to be absolved from responsibility of what is happening in the lower levels of management for the time being, had it not now become clear that during John Paul II’s reign it was simply a continuation of the cover-up of the same ongoing problem.

But it is clear that the sheer scale of the operation and the levels within the hierarchy it was maintained by the end of his long reign as Pope, that the culture was a reflection of John Paul II himself – or else that John Paul II himself was simply a reflection of the culture of the organisation, as after all, it is cardinals that elected him. Indeed, words he approved gave away his own attitude, after he convened an extraordinary meeting of US cardinals, senior bishops and Vatican officials, to deal with the crisis in the American Catholic Church. It was a crisis, remember, not because the level of abuse had suddenly gone up, and in fact the publicity may well have reduced it significantly - just that lawyers were finding out about it. Clearly, rampant child abuse which had been going on so long was not considered a major crisis until it started to cost serious money.

There were two main outcomes of the meeting. One was that not only did most of the abuse “not really count as paedophilia because most of the victims were adolescents” – which may have been technically true, but was an insulting slap in the face for most of the victims and casual minimisation of the seriousness and distress caused by the issue for them. And the greatest criticism was not of priests and bishops because of the abuse done to children, but because priests had broken their vows of celibacy. Clearly, the church was more concerned about ideological policy rules being broken than the harm done to children.

Notably, and read the wording carefully, a special process was approved for the dismissal of a priest “who has become notorious, and is guilty of the serial, predatory, sexual abuse of minors” (my italics). In other words, if a priest has abused children a few times but has got away with it and it hasn’t come to public attention because we’ve succeeded in keeping it under wraps, then we’ll keep him on as a priest offering moral guidance to his flock and dishing out religious reprimands to those who stray from the path of righteousness. So, not much change there then.

When US bishops tried to impose a zero-tolerance policy to restore confidence, John Paul II personally overruled it, implying that the church’s policy at the highest level was that you could get away with predatorily sexually abusing one child and still remain as a priest, and possibly do more if they could keep it quiet. With regards to Cardinal Law’s role in his funeral, most people don’t seem to realise that promotion (for that is what it was) to the position of Archpriest at the Basilica of St Mary Major that intrinsically involved him having a senior role in the Pope’s funeral, could only have come with full examination of the cardinal’s background and the approval of the pope himself. And with the Pope’s proven willingness to personally intervene in decisions at many levels within the church hierarchy, it is entirely appropriate to blame John Paul II himself for the insulting outrage of Cardinal Bernard Law’s role at his funeral, not faceless Vatican officials.

And with the revelation that as long as 40 years ago, abuse allegations were considered such a serious problem that Pope John XXIII made strenuous efforts to conceal them, John Paul II’s sudden Damascan-like conversion to ‘openness’ about abuse allegations as if he’s only just discovered them, does begin to look a bit…well, ‘rich’, to put it mildly. It is evident that until it became big and expensive news, John Paul II simply continued the policy of suppression and concealment, clearly handed down from pope to pope, without taking any serious measures to stamp it out while the abuse continued unabated.

What would Jesus have said about the whole business?
Jesus of course had a reputation, not just as a spiritual leader and representative of God on earth, but also as an aggressive activist - kicking over the tables and chasing out of the temple people he considered to be using it for dishonourable business (Mathew 21:12), and we also know he cared deeply about children. It may be hypothetical speculation, but one wonders just how many tables he would have kicked over in the Vatican. I mean, where would he start? I can’t help picturing a scene of Vatican police attempting to arrest Jesus for disruption and vandalism. What an irony that would be. The devil truly works in strange ways.

In the next instalment: Can it be gay priests making all those women pregnant?

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?

The Empire Strikes Back - Part I of VI

Reactionary Bigotry
Let me run a metaphor by you. You passionately want to go scuba diving for the first time. You know that although the sharks that frequent the area where your boat is rarely actually attack humans, you are conscious of their presence. As you are adjusting the straps on your flippers, you notice that the largest shark in the area is swimming quietly round, as if examining the boat, and you stare at its cold, unforgiving eye. Then, just as you are positioning the mask and checking your air regulator, the shark suddenly takes a dramatic lunge out of the water, as if attempting to snatch you out of the boat, as in the movie, its forward-projecting jaws missing you by a short distance, just grazing your wet suit. Then it backs off and apparently continues swimming round the boat in a relatively peaceful manner. Still want to get in the water?

That is effectively the position of gay men who have been thinking of becoming Catholic priests. A few weeks ago, authoritative sources from the Vatican suggested that new rules and procedures are being prepared to eliminate the prospect of gay priests being ordained – as if that would work. They seemed to think that this would solve the problem of sexual abuse of children by officials of the Catholic Church (overwhelmingly priests). As Cardinal Ratzinger, the new Pope’s opinions of gay people were well known, being party to a document that described gay people as being ‘intrinsically disordered’. At the time of Pope John Paul II’s death when the identity of the new pope was not yet known but was being hotly discussed, correspondence I received from a former Catholic seminarian said he had personal experience of Ratzinger’s direct involvement in decisions to generally find ways to oppress gay seminarians. This included, for example, stopping groups of gay seminarians using church property to hold meetings to discuss their issues among a number of other suppressive measure. Clearly his opinion hasn’t changed much since and despite a number of blatantly gay or bisexual popes in the past, the Catholic Church continues its demonisation of gay people.

We know it’s big….
To look at this issue from a very simplistic perspective for a moment, one can understand to a degree why the current concern about gay priests: The child abuse scandals that have come to light in the United States have cost the Catholic Church a monumental amount of money so far (significantly over half a billion US dollars) and some dioceses would have been easily bankrupted had it not been for handouts by the Vatican itself. And the majority of those abused have been boys, so there is a superficially reasonable, if slightly simplistic assumption that I’ll examine later, that the root cause of the problem was because the priests abusing them were specifically gay. Thereby, justifying church homophobia and supporting the notion that preventing gay men from becoming priests would simply solve the problem.

…But let’s pretend it’s not happening
Notice that I stress the ‘come to light’ bit, because now we all know that the church has known these abuses have been widespread for many years. It’s just that the Catholic Church was successful in suppressing wider public awareness of the issue for a very long time. Priests were moved from parish to parish, where they would abuse again and be moved on, so the church has been instrumental in causing a lot of children to be unnecessarily abused, which I think has been – justifiably in my opinion – largely the basis of their huge financial penalties.

Some sources say that western priests who were deemed to be too much of a danger were shipped off to Africa where there was more chance they could get away with it because of the generally less tolerant attitude to homosexuality (and thus children would be less likely to speak out) and greater authority of the church in society. Thus the problem could be removed to a safer part of the world. Safer for the Catholic Church, that is – not for the children they were ministering to of course, but obviously, poor African children don’t matter so much as rich western children whose parents have ready access to lawyers. At the same time the public relations effort could be maintained with the story of the priest leaving in an honourable fashion in order to be missionaries to the poor Africans. So Africa has become the dumping ground not only international industrial conglomerates, but an international religious conglomerate too. (Note: Since first posting this, I've been informed some Asian countries were also used as a dumping ground for abusive priests)

Why the disparity between industrialised countries and Africa?
As an aside, this does rather beg the question: Why hasn’t there been a public scandal in many places in Africa comparable to the extent of the situation in western industrialised countries, especially if that’s where the worst offenders are shipped off to? A correspondent from Cameroon, a predominantly Catholic country, explained to me recently the relationship between the population, the church and state. The authority of the church is such that anyone who openly criticises the church is generally looked down on by others for attempting to rock the boat, as if the church is above reproach. This awe of the church extends obviously to such a high proportion of the population that the influence of the church on the organs of state is so great that if you become a nuisance to the church, it is the government and the police that will come down on you.

Thus, the government is in effect the agents and enforcers of the church to a very large extent rather than protectors of the population from the monster in its midst. This is very reminiscent of the situation in most European countries only a short while ago, where the virtually impregnable church would condemn to death people who challenged its authority, such as reformers having the temerity to publish the Bible in English so that the population could see for themselves how the original Christian message was being distorted and corrupted by priests and bishops for their own ends. But of course, once the judgement was passed, the actual executions were performed by civil authorities, so the church itself didn’t have to get blood on its own hands in public. Torture sessions in order to extract confessions were, after all, usually performed behind closed doors so the screams and rivers of blood were hidden from public view.

Additionally, the rights of children don’t yet have the same priority that they do in many industrialised countries, and my correspondent was unaware of any organisation working specifically for children’s rights in Cameroon. He confirmed that if a child told his parents that a priest had molested him at Sunday school, for example, for the parents to protest to anyone about it would essentially be a futile exercise. But that widespread poverty meant that there was a likelihood that if it could become a threat, the family would most likely be paid off, and relatively cheaply. As it happens, a South African journalist visiting me a couple of years ago told me that Catholic missionaries are still paying children for sex.

So it isn’t that the widespread abuse of children isn’t happening in Africa, just that as power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it is likely to be just as big – just not yet uncovered. The techniques of sweeping it under the carpet are almost certainly still working as well in Africa as they have until recently in wealthier countries.

In the next instalment: damage limitation and wilful obstruction of justice