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Sat 23 May, 2009 12:37 pm
How familiar are people with the commission fo enquiry into child abuse in Ireland, whose principle focus was the Irish Catholic Church? I have an interest in the operation of religious insititutions within the state. For the most part, we have a careful-does-it, hands-off approach to their regulation lest we cross the religious-intolerance line. For Ireland, this line is more like the great wall of China, since the Irish largely are of deeply Catholic faith.
Brief precis: Irish Catholic congregations responsible for operating children's schools and reformatories demonstrate, and I stress, systematic physical and sexual child abuse. The long and the short is if you were a member of the clergy in such congregations, you were either doing it, encouraging it or actively or passively protecting it. Signs of systematisation include, for instance, clergy discovered by the outside world to be abusers were simply moved to other institutions in the network where they continued to abuse.
Problems:
1. The Catholic Church, as a whole, tends to protect its own, thus protect its reputation upon which its power relies.
2. The internal organisation of the Catholic Church is not subject to any extensive external scrutiny - they are responsible for regulating their own.
3. As above, the Irish people are mostly of deep Catholic faith and as such will not tend to stand against a Catholic institution, only individuals within it - this much is clear from the reaction both of victims and their families. They are typically seeking blood, yes, but not reform.
4. The power of the Church on its own plus the power of the democratic base of Catholics renders the state unable to act against the guilty institutions. They cannot shut down the system because this would be seen as an attack on the Irish Catholic Church who would certainly present it that way, and this would lose the government the people's support. The system appears unbreakable.
5. The only way, then, to shut down the system is for parents to refuse to send their children into it. However this would be seen by the parents themselves as an attack on their own church. With such a religious people, I worry that this is unlikely. In fact, I feel the opposite - families that religious will tend to put their relationship with the Church before the safety of their own children. In words, this sounds outrageous, but can you imagine the opposite? That this system will naturally shut down because people turn against it? I can't.
More transparency in this network of institutions has been demanded - straight after by far the biggest offending congregation, the Christian Brothers, successfully ensured that no-one would ever learn the identities of the individual offenders. The Christian Brothers know what happened, they know we know, they fully admit the abuses took place, but they will not have their own held to account by external agents. Transparency is not forthcoming. The Church holds itself above state justice (as per 2 above).
The Ryan report strongly recommended that the congregations examine how such abuses could arise. This demonstrates a remarkable degree of self-deception. The enquiry demonstrated the abuse to be systematic and the protection and freedom of the abusers to be organised. The system itself is the cause - the individual perpetrators only the effect. It's like recommending dealing with serial killers by asking them to take a good, hard, long look at themselves... then letting them go. The system is self-aware, it knows how the abuses arose because it facilitated.
Make no mistake - the system is not a religious institution. Maybe it once was, but the shortcomings of the Church allowed it to become, essentially, a sadistic paedo ring with only nominal religious status. But this nominal religious status affords it the protection by the Church, the state and the deeply faithful. Bad people designed the system, but everyone chipped in in making it.
Herein lies the problem and, I think, the solution. The Church won't betray a Catholic institution. The state won't bring down a Catholic institution. And the people won't believe a Catholic institution to be inherently corrupt, let alone evil. The whole problem rests on perception - the perception of these congregations as actual religious institutions; the perception of the clergy within them being actual Christian people.
One of the victims testified to being tied to a cross and raped by one priest while others stood around and masterbated. Apologies for the image - we all know that's horrible... the rape of a child and the encouragement thereof, and by ordained Catholics. It's so horrible one might overlook a huge contradiction: they tied him to a cross! They used a) their greatest religious symbol as an implement of child-rape, and b) the image of Christ crucified as the scene. That cross represents Christ's crucifix, no other. They bound him to it like Christ... and raped him. We are not talking about religious people - we are not talking about Christians.
Christians, that is people who ARE Christian not people who wear the name as a shield, couldn't possibly do that. Satanists, yes, but not someone who believes in and loves Christ. It's a logical impossibility.
This key point has to be recognised. These institutions have nominal religious status (within the state) and nominal Catholic status within the Church, but they are an anti-Christian sadist cult when all is said and done. Once it is established that these congregations are not religious institutions, the people will abandon them and the state will move against them.
The key obstacle is the Catholic Church: it is necessary for the Church, for the future safety of children, to admit that it can be tricked, that an evil person can become ordained, that depraved cults can acquire nominal Church status, and, further, it is necessary for the Church to make such false congregations an object of their own investigation and persecution. This is the only real issue here - the Church cannot claim infallibility and at the same time root out perverts in their midst.
The Church is loathe to do this. Always is the emphasis on individual action even while recognising the behaviour is endemic to the system.
Here is my thesis: To not distinguish within the clergy and Catholic institutions between the genuinely Christian and parasites using Catholic perks, to not admit that institutions themselves with nominal Catholic status may have acquired it or have been taken over by unchristian elements, to not reveal such institutions, essentially annul their Catholic status and hand them over to state authorities, in all to not act against such systems within the Catholic Church, the Church itself is complicit and should be held as such. If the Church fails to act, it should be held as abetting crimes against humanity.
Bones
@Bones-O,
It occurs to me how similar religious organizations are to mob organizations. Both subvert state authority but in a systematically dogmatic manner.
@Bones-O,
Perhaps. They remind me more of the police and the government: inherent cronyism and a survivalistic over moralistic bent, wielding unquestionable authority and subject to little or none.
But then in my other thread on Resentment in the State, though I have not stated it explicitly, I compare the state to mob protection rackets, so directly or indirectly... this might accord.
)
@Bones-O,
What people don't understand is that on a larger scale, governments are little more than mob rackets anyway. It all comes to the same thing--manipulation, control, protection of "one's own", etc. We're living in global anarchism, but somehow the "freedom" isn't trickling down to us little guys.
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