Clare’s blog, aka rantspace

Catholic priest John Haines has been convicted of offences of child porn (see here). And it was entirely due to his own stupidity! Now I suspect the average person is not going to believe that ANYone can be as stupid as Haines was in this case, but here’s the story: Haines had a thing for taking pix of his child victims on his mobile phone. Not unusual. But when he subsequently donated the phone to a parishioner, WITHOUT removing all the pix, he dropped himself right in it. (I told you you wouldn’t believe it ) If this had been a life and death situation, Haines would win a top Darwin award! Thankfully, the parishioner had a decent sense of right and wrong (unlike the one who gave a character witness in court) and took the phone to the police. One wonders if the parishioner who gave a character reference would have been so ready to do so if they’d seen/discovered the pics themself! And also thankfully, the judge’s response to the character references was that Haines’ apparent decency only makes the breach of trust even more profound. This is a far cry from the past attitude of judges, which was to see the aberrant behaviour as somehow more excusable because the priests involved were good on the surface. That attitude, and that of the parishioners who defended Haines as being “not like that”, is based on a fairytale perspective on life (see my blog entry here). It’s encouraging to see some shift, however slight. The lawyer defending him (who was obviously pushing shit uphill, but sometimes that’s what lawyers have to try to do), tried the defence that Haines was sexually inexperienced due to a prohibition on sex for Catholic priests. Perhaps he was (although it seems he was getting some experience!), but how much experience does it take for a Catholic priest to know these days that child porn is wrong? Should it, in fact, take any experience at all? Surely we have a right to expect that those who preach morality should have a working understanding of it for themselves!

Haines is now on “administrative leave”, but one has to hope that the Catholic Church will defrock him rather than follow his example of stupidity and immorality by allowing him to remain a priest.

Hollingworth has conceded he thinks the job of GG was wrong for him (see here).  Let’s hope it hasn’t taken him until now to come to that conclusion, because abuse victims could have told him that years, if not decades, ago. They could have told him that when he reassured victims he was “keeping a close eye” on how abuse complaints were being dealt with, but which later inaction he justified as “not being directly involved in”. They could have told him that when he refused to defrock a clergyman (a bishop by the time of the complaint) for underage sex, which he justified as the (14yo) victim’s instigation. They could have told him that when he appointed a clergyman against whom there were two known abuse allegations to a post on the diocesan sexual misconduct complaints committee.

And now Hollingworth tries to justify his failure based on some perceived, or unperceived (it’s not really clear which) separation of church and state. He obviously still doesn’t get it! The public disillusionment with him was nothing to do with any link or otherwise between church and state – it was simply and purely that he stood exposed as miserably inadequate in dealing with sexual immorality in his subordinates, and pitifully shameless in his attempts to wriggle out of responsibility for his poor judgement. Moreover, his supposed moral (religious) and ethical (social welfare degree) education had obviously done nothing to improve him.

Churchman or not, such qualities are not what we want to see in a GG.