The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #162491 Message #3871094
Posted By: Joe Offer
11-Aug-17 - 07:28 PM
Thread Name: BS: Clerical Abuse of Children
Subject: RE: BS: Catholic Abuse of Children
I think you're being unfair to my position, Raggytash. Jim has taken a statment made by two old nuns and repeated it time and time again in an attempt to show that it is the general opinion of the Catholic Church toward the Magdalene Laundries. It's a tendency people have when they speak out against crime - they exaggerate and they use information out of context and out of proportion.
As I've said before, there was a homeless man in a wheelchair who yelled at a teenage kid at our Catholic school gym. The father of the boy is very much opposed to our homeless shelter. He milked that story for all it was worth for over a year, saying that the man "assaulted" his son and leaving out the detail that this was an old man in a wheelchair. It was stretching things to even call this a "verbal assault."
I highly suspect that Jim's quote is at least ten years old, possibly from 2002, when the Magdalene Sisters film came out. It was indeed an expression of contempt for the victims, and that is deplorable. I'm sure some of the sisters who worked in the laundries did their best to try to rationalize their way out of the guilt for their actions - we humans have a natural tendency to rationalize our offenses. But whatever the case, the last of the laundries closed in 1996, and most were closed long before.
So, yeah, if Jim is going to use an example over and over again, over the course of a number of years, then I think he needs to give that quote some context. It's just like his ludicrous use above of a 1925 statement from bishops about dancing - although at least he did us the favor of furnishing a date for that one. But for him to use an undated and undocumented statement from two nuns as proof of the "general contempt [my] Church had for its victims," is ludicrous. Some officials in my church showed contempt for victims, of that I have no doubt. I gave the example of Cardinal Pell, who was described as having a "sociopathic lack of empathy" when he met with victims in Australia. He was later transferred to Rome to act as finance minister, a job he was good at - I think his inability to handle the sex scandal at home may well have been part of the reason why he was transferred to a finance position. And yes, there were many Catholic leaders who had a lack of empathy for victims - and they deserve whatever penalty they have to pay for that.
But as a whole, I think that Catholics were very sympathetic toward the victims, and they were outraged by bishops like Pell who failed to show empathy and put business interests over the interests of the victims. To counter Jim's two Magdalene nuns, I can quote a nun who very angrily told me, "Joe, we told them (the bishop's office) what was going on, and they did NOTHING." Many, many priests and nuns and lay Catholics were and still are very angry about the conduct of bishops in this scandal. Benedict and Francis have appointed local bishops who are focused on finally cleaning up the mess, but there are still many John Paul II appointees in office.
But my point is that if we are to address these crimes effectively, we must address them specifically. Individual people committed these individual crimes at specific locations and at specific times. There were many parallel events, but the stories and reasons behind the events are different. When the same stories and the same perpetrators and the same victims and the same incidents are reported over and over again, this gives a false impression of the actuality of the event - just like the dad who left out inconvenient details of the story of the old cripple who yelled at his kid.
And then we get back to Rome. There's an excellent article in New Yorker Magazine (click) titled "What Pope Benedict Knew about abuse in the Catholic Church." Here's an excerpt:Though the sexual-abuse crisis reached its peak in the public sphere during Benedict XVI's papacy, the single figure most responsible for ignoring this extraordinary accumulation of depravity is the sainted John Paul II. In the context of his predecessor's deplorable neglect, Pope Benedict gets slightly higher marks than most. In 2001, he acted to give his office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, jurisdiction over all sexual-abuse cases, and soon he began to push the Maciel investigation, despite considerable Vatican opposition. After ascending the throne of St. Peter, he became the first Pope to kick predator priests out of the Church: in 2011 and 2012, the last two full years of his papacy, the Church defrocked three hundred and eighty-four offending priests.
It took a lot of work and a lot of courage for Ratzinger to push past John Paul II in 2001 and take responsibility for sex abuse cases.
John Paul II had become Pope in 1978, and he ignored the sex abuse problems at the very time when they were happening, preferring to let the local dioceses take care of their own problems. John Paul II has phenomenal power and popularity during his reign. He could have traded on that to bring the problem under control much earlier, but he didn't. There was no apparatus for collecting child abuse information in Rome until Ratzinger set it up in 2001, so it's unlikely that much will be found in any "secret archives" Rome might have on the matter.
So, for better or worse, because of the decentralized nature of the Catholic Church, Rome was not involved in the sex abuse scandal. I think that it has been generally helpful since Ratzinger took over the problem in 2001, but it is still mostly a local problem.
There are those who find fault with Rome for failing to defrock priests who committed sex crimes, but that's a debatable legal matter. If Rome defrocks a priest, it loses its last ability to exert any control over that priest, and can therefore no longer be held responsible for that ex-priest's actions after the defrocking.
So, yes, it was a very bad problem. But we need to discuss it realistically, in a realistic context.
-Joe-