Clare’s blog, aka rantspace

The Vatican has castigated Irish bishops for covering up abuse, in the wake of the Irish report on the investigation into the problem.  Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, a right-hand man of the Pope, described the abuse scandal as “humiliating” and “abominable”.  I think that’s the strongest terms the Vatican has used yet!

There’s just one small point: the Irish report made it clear that the Vatican was complicit in the cover-up.  Presumably they hope no-one will realise that, and they’ll be able to place all the blame on the local bishops.

Father Peter Kennedy has been sacked from his church in South Brisbane (see here and see here), despite having the support of over 1600 congregation members. He has refused to leave, and the Catholic Church is now forecasting legal action to have him removed. Further, he has argued that mediation is pointless, given the church’s strong-arm tactics so far, and refused to be involved. The archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, has even gone to the extent of saying that some sacraments performed by Kennedy were not legitimate and that he would nominate a future date for “valid baptisms”.

Why has he been sacked? Because of “a dispute over the use of lay people and politically correct language in services”. Oh, and he’s questioned the virginity of Mary! Dear me!

How ironic is it that the church would deny the validity of a priest’s ordination (by saying that the sacraments he performed are not legitimate) for simple doctrinal dissension, while sexually abusive priests are retained in the priesthood, cosseted and reassured?

Children sometimes play at “opposites”, where black is white and white is black – the church makes a living out of it!

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Follow-up: Kennedy takes most of his congregation with him to a new location, and the diocesan chancellor foreshadows the diocesan response here.

Barack Obama, as a left-of-centre president, was always going to get panned by the Vatican, but it’s happened in a far more laughable way than I could have imagined possible!  AAP reports that Obama has been criticised by the Vatican for overturning a ban on state funding for overseas abortion clinics (see here).  But it was the form of the criticism that had me astounded – though I should be used to the breathtaking superciliousness of the church by now.  The Vatican official ascribed to Obama “the arrogance of someone who believes they are right”, and further added that “What is important is to know how to listen… without locking oneself into ideological visions”.

If there’s one group of people who are arrogant enough to believe they’re right (and threaten those who think differently with eternal damnation!), and who are locked into an ideological vision to the extent of being unable to listen, it’s the conservative church!

Ok, this is really simple.  I came to blog on a new topic, re-read the most recent one, and thought: I just have to make this point.  In the previous blog entry to this one, Haines is “defended” with the argument that he didn’t really know what he was doing because he was sexually inexperienced. And, let it be said, this is not an unusual defence for Catholic priests to offer, or, indeed, for the Catholic Church to use in their own defence. But if inexperience is such a danger, then why doesn’t the Catholic Church simply lift the restriction on celibacy?

The closure of the Catholic Church’s in-house treatment programme for sexually abusive clergy, Encompass, has brought out some interesting figures. Firstly, Professor Timothy O’Hearn, a former board member, said that a review found that maintaining the programme would cost $750,000 a year, and the cost can’t be justified.

Can someone tell me, then, how the Catholic Church can spend 20 times that on World Youth Day, and not see the equivalent 20 years of treating abusive clergy being worth the money?

Secondly, a Sydney Morning Herald article says this:
“Opened in 1997 by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes, Encompass treated more than 1100 people, 250 of them in an intensive six-month residential psychosexual program, according to its final newsletter.”

So that’s an average of 100 clergy treated per year for 11 years, of which 23 or so each year were considered serious enough problems to be doing the intensive residential programme. Those weren’t all Catholic, by the way – other denominations referred problem clergy to Encompass too. But given that there are around 12,000 clergy in Australia at any given time, having to treat 1100 of them gives some idea of how big this problem is.

So given a) the scope of the problem clearly set out in their own newsletter, and b) how much the church is prepared to spend on other things, how can they not find justification for maintaining the Encompass programme?

The money’s not really an issue (even if their priorities are).
The number of clergy to treat isn’t an issue (the less to treat, the less it will cost, after all).

About the only answer I can logically conclude is left is that the treatment has been found to be unsuccessful.

So, the Pope’s apologised to Australian victims of clergy sexual abuse. So far, not so good. Because he didn’t tell victims it was going to happen (check out this page of my site for what should be the minimum requirements of such an apology, to see how the Pope fell short), thereby keeping them in quite unnecessary suspense. Secondly, he chose to do it during a mass for clergy! How inappropriate is it to be saying the apology – as part of a prepared speech – to the group of people who contain the perpetrators, rather than the victims?? The victims couldn’t even be there to hear it in person! Thirdly, he seemed to place equal or greater weight on mentioning the shame of (presumably non-perpetrating) clergy and the damage caused to the church’s witness, as to the needs of the victims. And fourthly, he referred specifically to sexual abuse of minors, thereby completely ignoring those many adults also abused by clergy.

So given that this apology falls well short of what he should have said, and where and to whom it should have been said, it will be very interesting to see just how much action happens when the dust from WYD settles. Let’s just revise the checklist the Pope imposed on his clergy for future action:
1) these misdeeds should receive unequivocal condemnation
2) victims should receive compassion and care
3) those responsible must be brought to justice
4) it is an urgent priority to promote a safer and more wholesome environment
5) the Church must work together to combat this evil

Isn’t it interesting that out of 5 action points, three of them (points 1, 3 and 5) are things that the church should be doing already – but obviously isn’t, or the Pope wouldn’t need to exhort them?

But I still think the most inappropriate part was to do it at a mass for clergy, thereby not only effectively offering the apology to the perpetrator group, but specifically excluding the victims who should have been able to be there to hear it.

Cardinal Pell is, as we all know, all over the pages of the press again – this time for a “badly worded” letter (his words) that just happens to have come across as denial of an abuse victim’s allegations and the ongoing problem with the priest in question. You can read about it in more detail here and here and here. Quite apart from the questionable plausibility of his claim that though church lawyers had the tape evidence of the incident being non-consensual from 2005 they didn’t happen to mention it to him, to have dismissed the claim a) on the grounds of consensuality, and b) on the offender’s word, is both stupid and immoral. By 2002, when Anthony Jones brought his complaint to the church for the second time, church authorities had absolutely no excuse for accepting an alleged offender’s word unquestioningly. (And it must have been unquestioning, because it was directly opposed to the church’s own internal investigator’s assessment.) Moreover, it would appear that to Pell consensual homosexual sex between priest and parishioner is ok – which flies in the face of 1) his own conservative anti-gay stance, 2) the clearly understood power imbalance between clergy and parishioners, and 3) the priest being supposed to be celibate.

(Aside: How come politicians who support homosexuality and/or abortion bills get threatened by Pell with denial of communion, but a gay priest doesn’t?)

But what we must not forget is that this wriggling out of negative publicity on abuse issues is not the first time Pell has had to do so. It’s only a few years since he flatly denied that the church ever imposed gag orders (confidentiality agreements) on victims settling abuse claims – a denial he also had to make excuses for when the Daily Telegraph printed a double-page spread showing photos of the very gag orders Pell denied existed. His excuses then had a similar ring: the lawyers didn’t tell me, I really meant well, look at all I’ve done for abuse victims.

I know of at least one other instance, in 1994, when Pell’s assistant wrote to a victim denying prior knowledge or earlier correspondence with a victim of a De La Salle brother, but the then-head of the De La Salle order said that Pell had previously contacted him after receiving the complaint.

And further back still, when Gerald Ridsdale was at the height of his abusive career (for details, see his entry in my perpetrator list), Pell declared he knew nothing of Ridsdale’s activities, despite the abuse being common knowledge, and Pell sharing the presbytery – where many of the abuses happened – with Ridsdale for a year. Ridsdale has been convicted of multiple counts against 47 boy victims. Presumably Pell was either blind or stupid, or he turned a blind eye.

(Note: A fuller treatment of the Pell/Ridsdale links can be found here.)

How many times can one man be proven to have lied when he said “I didn’t know” and “I meant well” before Rome decides he’s a liability?

I invite anyone who has clear evidence of Pell’s duplicity to post it here as a comment.

Apart from the quoted amounts spent on WYD by the church ($150M) and the NSW govt ($86M+), now we find that the Federal govt (ie. John Howard, just before the last election) threw in another $22M, which is being challenged as unconstitutional in the Supreme Court (see here). And new legislation especially to “protect the Catholic pilgrims from harassment” is in force. Has anyone stopped to wonder just what sort of political manoeuvering must have gone on behind the scenes to prompt all this? And Pell says the church didn’t ask for any of it!!! Yeah right!

There are two types of sceptics, I’ve decided. There are those who debunk claims of the “miraculous” by finding and offering a rational scientific explanation, and there are those who debunk any claim they don’t understand and/or that hasn’t been proven. And many of those in the second category will describe themselves as scientists, but I contend that this is a travesty of the fundamental nature of science. True scientists ought to be a) seeking knowledge (which is, after all, what the word science means), and b) acknowledging that there are things which science hasn’t yet been able to find an explanation for – which doesn’t mean there isn’t one! In other words, a true scientist doesn’t say “I can’t prove it, therefore it isn’t true”, but rather “I can’t explain it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true; research is necessary to find out enough to be able to decide”.

How does this relate to clergy abuse or the church? Well actually, I’ve been following the news articles about Pier Giorgio Frassati (deceased) being flown out to Sydney for WYD, and noticed a claim that when they exhumed him as part of the preparation for sainthood, his body was uncorrupted. A little internet digging on the conditions of his burial turned up not only what I was looking for (entombed in the family vault), but other claims of incorruptibility among “the saints” of the church. And on another site discussing it (comprising, let it be said, one obviously devout Catholic and many sceptics), I found a link to an article in The Skeptic journal (p.35) about the whole issue. Now having previously been exposed to those who run The Skeptic, I think many of them are so keen on being sceptical that they lose sight of being rational, so I was a little reluctant to follow that link. However, it was worth reading as a quite rational counter-argument to the devout and unquestioning Catholic on the discussion site.

And that was where I began thinking about what characterises scepticism, and how it overlaps or conflicts with a truly scientific enquiring mindset. Naturally, of course, the whole thing also bore out what I have previously argued about faith: that blind belief in what the church says is a recipe for disaster. Or at least for being thought an idiot!
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Oh, and by the way – if you had any thoughts of visiting Frassati’s dead body as it lies in state in St Mary’s Cathedral during WYD, to check out the claims of incorruptibility, don’t bother. The coffin will be closed.

A: To shoring up the shortfall in government dollars created by giving churches such incredible tax exemptions.

What sort of $$ are we talking about? Take a look at this comment in Crikey for some actual figures. The Catholic church, despite being a business (with charity sidelines), gets tax exemptions amounting to millions of dollars per year. The Anglican Church likewise, though no figures are given. But just stop to think about how many churches there are, and realise that each one is exempt from land tax, council rates and capital gains tax (to name just a few of the taxes from which they are exempt), and you begin to get the idea.  Think of the size of St Andrew’s Square, in the Sydney CBD, and wonder for a moment what the council rates on that would be! The totals across all denominations are in the billions. One wonders, if the churches were forced to separate charity from business operations and only claim tax exemptions for the charitable operations, just how much of those billions would remain tax exempt. The government would certainly suddenly find itself a lot richer!