Joe, it's not just the upper ranks. It permeates right through all levels of the hierarchy here. Those upper ranks are simply the visible echelon who possess the power to cover things up, perpetrate the spin, re-locate the offenders. Etc. That whole "rank" question is a side-road.

This or that Bishop of Wherever is not the vital issue, and if only his head rolls, it will let a lot of others off the chopping block. The rot goes way deeper - and it's not rooted in being Irish, or being Catholic, but in good old (or bad old) human nature. To excuse one sector while faulting the other is to utterly miss the point. It's about a forceful network linking arms and looking after its own when the need arises. With all this focus on Bishops (I mean their focus, Joe, not yours), the "S" word that comes to my mind is not scapegoat but smokescreen.

You wrote in a previous post:   

During my tour of Ireland several years ago, I was struck by the severity of Irish Catholicism. We American Catholics are generally a pretty happy bunch (and not prone to blind obedience), but the Catholic Church seemed dour and dreary and rigid in Ireland. I have to admit that it did not seem like a healthy or joyful atmosphere. "Authority" and "obedience" were terms that seemed to fit well into the Irish Catholic Church.

It comes down to one thing. TOO MUCH POWER. And it did what power is famously said to do. It's easy not to be "prone to blind obedience" when you have some choices. Not so easy when you're under a virtual dictatorship with nowhere to go, or enough money. That's how it was here for most of the 20th century, until things loosened up economically and socially in the middle 90s.

In America you have several mainstream religions, and many alternative ones, influencing the national consciousness, and simply by their numbers these serve to balance each other out and give variety to people's thinking, because from the start not everyone believes the same things. A friend from California tells me her class at school (in the mid 1950s) had a healthy mix of Jewish kids, Protestants kids of every stripe, Catholic kids, plus a Buddhist and a Hindu (who were accepted by the others perfectly well). This HAS to make a difference to the way human minds develop, which in turn affects how societies develop.

Here, until very recently, the overwhelming majority of the population has been Catholic. And white. Those few who weren't Catholic and white were Protestant and white, or Jewish and white. And the Church had a stranglehold not only on people's spiritual life but also their children's education; because for much of the 20th century the impoverished State could not afford to compete with the Church (even if it had wanted to, which it didn't) in the field of learning. Throughout childhood our young were emotionally blackmailed with guilt and damnation and You'll-Go-to-Hell-If... for some of the simplest, most natural desires and pleasures. From an early age they were trained to think and do as they're told to think and do, or else. Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man. No kidding.

Because there WAS no other significant religious authority in Ireland, it meant the Church had the field all to itself, plus an unconscionable amount of power over people's minds in non-spiritual matters as well (not to mention financial resources beyond the reach of the ordinary parishioner). The populace was cowed into having large families they couldn't hope to support or house (with women's bodies and spirits worn out before middle age) to keep up the numbers of the obeying flock; or travelling any distance and terrain to get to Mass because to miss it was a mortal sin, right up there with murder. A friend's parents walked to church (few people could afford cars then) a 16-mile round trip, in rural Donegal, in winter. He tells me that what he remembers is not the doctrinal teaching, but the exhaustion on his mother's and father's faces.

There also was not at that time the constitutional separation between Church and State that there always should be, where the two keep each other in check rather than colluding in a too-mighty alliance. With the government and religion in close co-operation, there was quite simply nothing else on the horizon that had any force to act effectively. Without power, you cannot challenge. You can only suffer the consequences of displeasing the tyrant.   


MichaelR made a good point, which I heartily agree with, and so do many people here: LET THE CLERGY MARRY and allow them a healthy and permitted outlet for their sexual energies. Those energies are not going to go away if you try to stifle them, they just become warped and twisted. Which is precisely what happened. No one had sufficient strength to go against the organisation, so it simply closed ranks and moved the offenders to do it again in pastures new.

Guest from Sanity replied to MichaelR (in part):

michaelr: "I'd like someone in this discussion to address the point I made a while ago:
celibacy is at the root of the problem . . ."

Okay, I'll address it.

1. If you're horney you can always jerk off!
2. If you find a cute nun, you can do it discreetly,, which some do.
3. If you can't find a cute nun, and want to keep it discrete, and in the church, find an ugly one.
4. If you go without the clergy garb, you can find someone in a bar.
5. You can commit adultery with a parishioner.
6. All of the above, are a cure for celibacy.
7. You can find another priest or young boy, and do homosexual things with them.

But apart from No. 1 (and for some, this includes No. 1), the above all mean that you have to break some vow or rule or taboo, therefore you are doing Wrong as well as having to live a lie. Those are not healthy choices. If a vow can be tossed aside whenever convenient, what value has it? If it has no value, why bother with it at all?

You don't want the most powerful players in your community - the clergy - to be tormented by guilt-inducing hormonal drives, because those will find an outlet, one way or the other, and be kept hidden ever after in soul-rotting deceit. And they're the ones who swing the weight in society, not you. Thank God (literally) that times are better now, our children freer.

Nos. 2-5 can also leave some very real consequences in their wake, such as illegitimate children - who until recently were sentenced to a horrible and hellish life. (The Magdalen Laundries and industrial schools need a chapter of their own in this shameful story.)

The evil of child-rape exists in every society. But here it grew monstrous, nourished by secrecy; and if some viable alternatives or rights of protest been available to the general citizenry, I believe it would not have been so widespread, or so locked in hypocrisy. It boiled down to - as it always does - Because We Can.

Jim's post does not exaggerate. And I fully echo his closing sentence.